Sexual Knowledge,Attitudes and Experiences of High School Students with and without Disabilities in Taiwan

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to investigate the sexual knowledge, attitudes, and experiences of high school students with and without disabilities and make a cross-categorical comparison. Participants were chosen on the basis of the cluster sampling procedure, consisting of 754 non-handicapped (NH), 423 mentally retarded (MR), 384 learning disabled (LD), 101 physically disabled (PD), and 296 hearing impaired (HI) adolescents. Researcher-developed instruments were administered. While the NH students took the inventories by group, the disabled participants were administered individually. Results indicated that NH students surpassed their disabled counterparts both in sexual knowledge and attitude inventories, whereas the HI group appeared to be most active in sexual experiences. Unexpectedly, while the NH group were most knowledgeable and demonstrated most positive attitude toward sexuality issues, they did not have much sexual experience as expected. Of the disabled groups, the LD outperformed the rest groups both in sexual knowledge and attitude inventories. Interestingly, although HI students reported to have most sexual experiences, they were not sexually informed. The obtained results also indicated that the MR group not only had least appropriate knowledge and most negative attitude but had least amount of contact with peers of the opposite sex. Further discussion was presented based on the above findings.

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