Many public health students receive little, if any, formal training in communicating health information to the public. Public health practitioners, however, are regularly asked to use communication strategies to convey health information. The lesson plan was designed to teach students mass communication strategies in the context of sexual health…

"Who's Responsible?" is an educational experience designed to help participants explore a chain of events that can lead to a teen pregnancy. In this activity, participants read a scenario in which the main character has a boyfriend who would like to have sex with her without using a condom. After attempting to talk about sex and contraception with…

Disparities in the rates of unintended pregnancy have increased for low-income African American women as compared to other groups due, in part, to declining contraception use. Women obtain family planning information from diverse sources, which may ultimately influence contraceptive decision making. For this qualitative study, we conducted…

There are many contraceptive choices available to people today. Learning about them can be dry, but the game "Name that Contraceptive!" can be a fun and interactive way to review, remember, and retain the details about contraceptive options. Name that Contraceptive is a card game in which students "bid" on the number of clues it will take them to…

This article explores the potential for introducing harm reduction into sexuality education. When the goal of sexuality education is on prevention and focuses on risk and public health concerns, a discussion of pleasure is rendered problematic, as many pleasurable behaviors are inherently "unsafe" or "risky" when considered using a safe-sex lens.…

The transition from high school to college offers adolescents more freedom that may result in increased risky sexual behaviors. This exploratory study examines sexual behaviors of freshmen. Half of participants completed a questionnaire during the first week of college and the other half during the last week of their freshmen year. Significant…

Twenty parents attending an urban community college were interviewed about how they respond to common questions children ask about sexuality. Parental responses to children's questions about sexuality were considered in relation to the authoritative and authoritarian patterns of communication identified by Baumrind (1967). The majority of parents…

Many sexuality education interventions focusing on determinants such as attitudes, knowledge, and skills have shown meager impact on sexual behavior. In addition, these determinants have been developed and evaluated for mixed gender or female-only priority populations. More specifically, sexuality education interventions have not been designed…

Big Decisions is a 10-lesson abstinence-plus curriculum for ages 12-18 that emphasizes sex as a big decision, abstinence as the healthiest choice, and the mandate that sexually active teens use condoms and be tested for sexually transmitted diseases. This program can be implemented with limited resources and facilitator training when abstinence…

African American youth are at risk for negative sexual behaviors such as early initiation and unplanned pregnancy. The purpose of the article is to identify the effective parent connectedness components in sexuality education interventions solely targeting African American youth. A total of 12 articles were found describing six intervention…

President Barack Obama has proposed an end to abstinence-only-until-marriage funding as Americans have known it for the better part of the last decade. This marks a significant change in direction, one that finally brings science and evidence back into government policy. His leadership on this new direction will be essential in the coming…

Male adolescents have been credited with a significant percentage of sex crimes in recent years. They are a heterogeneous population with offenses spanning the same range found among adult offenders. A lack of interpersonal social skills relevant to intimate relationships and inaccurate knowledge regarding appropriate sexual behaviors contribute…

The importance of including sexual health assessment (SHA) within the biopsychosocial evaluations of mental health and medical practice is discussed, and various protocols available in the extant literature are reviewed. Six principles for SHA are presented as well as a model protocol consisting of six basic lines of questioning with specific…

This article reviews the literature on the roles that schools, peers, and parents play in young people's sexuality education. We argue that the sexuality education children receive is far from just the facts; rather, it is an education in the maintenance of inequality. Sexuality education, as it is currently conceived, includes implicit and…

We examined parental perspectives about parent-child sexual communication through four focus groups conducted with 25 parents of young children. Participant comments fell into six areas: 1) personal experience with sexuality education, 2) current sexuality education efforts, 3) comfort and confidence, 4) content and timing, 5) importance of a…