Review articleSex and HIV Education Programs: Their Impact on Sexual Behaviors of Young People Throughout the World
Section snippets
Identification of evaluation studies
To be included in this review, each study had to meet the following criteria:
The program had to:
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Be a curriculum- and group-based sex or HIV education program (as opposed to an intervention involving only spontaneous discussion, only one-on-one interaction, or only broad school, community or media awareness activities).
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Focus on adolescents or young adults ages 9 to 24 years.
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Include a reasonably strong experimental or quasi-experimental design with both intervention
Results
The results are divided into four sections: characteristics of the studies reviewed, impact of programs on sexual risk behaviors and pregnancy and STD rates, impact of programs on mediating factors for sexual risk behaviors, and common characteristics of effective programs.
Conclusions and Recommendations
Many of these studies had significant limitations. For example, few described their respective programs adequately; none studied programs for youth engaging in same-sex behavior; some had problems with implementation; a few had relatively weak quasi-experimental designs; an unknown number had measurement problems; many were statistically underpowered; most did not adjust for multiple tests of significance; few measured impact on either STD or pregnancy rates; and still fewer measured impact on
Acknowledgments
Financial support for this research was provided by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through Family Health International (FHI)/YouthNet Project. The views reflected in this article do not necessarily reflect those of USAID, FHI, or ETR Associates.
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