PhD Scientific Days 2023

Mental Health Sciences - Posters N

Adolescents’ attitude towarIs Safe Sex May Be Measured without Being Influenced by Socio Economic Background Parameters

Text of the abstract

Introduction: High unwanted pregnancy, abortion and sexually-transmitted infection rates of adolescents demands improvement of sexual health education strategies, where besides knowledge expansion, participants’ willingness and attitude towards safe sex should also be targeted. Sexual Risk Behavior Beliefs and Self-efficacy (SRBBS) questionnaire is a measure for assessing adolescents' attitudes and norms towards engaging in safe sex practices and self-efficacy to refuse unsafe ones. It is still unexplained if SRBBS scores are affected by socioeconomic background factors.
Aims: Analyzing if some socioeconomic background parameters influence attitude scores measured by the eight subscales of SRBBS.
Methods: High school students (N=1338, 47.6% girls, age mean of 16.19±1.09) from a North-Hungarian town filled out our online questionnaire including socioeconomic parameters (gender, age, parents’ best education, number of siblings and perceived financial circumstances) and SRBBS that is consists of eight subscales including (1) attitudes and (2) norms about sexual intercourse, (3) self-efficacy in refusing sex and (4) barriers for condom use. We used factorial analysis of variance, with the significance level of 05, IBM SPSS version: 28.
Result: Gender showed a non-significant main effect in the scores of 6 subscales out of 8. ‘Self-efficacy in refusing sex’ and ‘barriers for condom use’ scores were statistically higher among girls compared to boys (F(1,1237)=166.943, p<0.001, η2p=0.12 and F(1,1244)=119.177, p<0.001, η2p=0.09 respectively). Age showed a weak correlation with the ‘norms about sexual intercourse’ and ‘attitudes about sexual intercourse’ subscales (rho(1251)=-0.232, p<0.001 and rho(1243)=-0.252, p<0.001, respectively). We have found no relationships between SRBBS scores and participants’ parents' highest education level, number of siblings and perceived financial status.
Conclusion: SRBBS scores seem to be slightly affected by adolescents’ socioeconomic parameters in our sample, therefore results of later analysis of attitude for safe sex and sexual health behavior won't really be affected by these factors. This has high importance for being sure that we avoid confounding bias in this field.
Funding: Our research was funded by the European Committee EFOP 3.4.3 project.