Youth and Parent Perspectives on Sexual Health Education for People with Intellectual Disabilities

Abstract

Youth with intellectual disabilities face barriers to receiving sex education including the lack of educational tools accessible for multiple cognitive and emotional learning styles. We conducted exploratory research to gather input from a diverse group of youth with disabilities and their guardians about needed learning modalities and sexual health content areas. Three focus groups were conducted with youth ages 17–28 years (n = 14) and three with parents (n = 16). An applied thematic analysis of the transcripts resulted in three structural codes related to topics of greatest interest for youth sexuality education, teaching tools and methods, and needs for ancillary parent education and support to help youth access information and health care. We identified a total of ten themes associated with the three structural codes. Next steps will be to create educational resource prototypes that are responsive to focus group input for testing in further research.