Wednesday, October 3, 2012

OSU study finds many factors affecting sexual health

Oregon State University College of Public Health and Human Sciences Professors Margaret Dolcini and Joseph Catania study how community and school programs can be counterproductive in preventing risky sexual behavior. For the past 25 years, Dolcini and Catania have studied low-income areas primarily containing black residents.

The statistics gathered showed that residents were at risk for being exposed to STIs, STDs and HIV/AIDS, but Dolcini and Catania were more concerned about why they were at risk. After conducting community studies in Chicago and San Francisco, they concluded that the way schools and community programs treat sexual health education is concerning.

“Schools either block out sex education or rely completely on the internet to educate children, and there are many sites with misrepresentation or incorrect information out there,” Catania said.

From their research, Catania and Dolcini found that schools could either not afford to keep their sex education programs due to budget cuts, or they relied on the youth to explore their sex education independently. Most youths and community leaders were not aware of the names of reliable Internet sites for sex education.

Other contributing factors are community members who refuse to get tested for HIV/AIDS, do not know their status or do not seek treatment if they test positive.

“Kids feel embarrassed or stigmatized by going to a clinic and don’t want to be seen leaving it, which creates quite a bit of reluctance,” Dolcini said.

While there is an at-home test kit that will be sold about $35 at Walgreens starting sometime this year or in 2013, there are still some concerns for the distributors.

Some worries include the lack of treatment available to those who test positive, and misuse or mishandling of the kit, which would lead to an inaccurate result.

“The distributors need to realize that even if someone is determined to be positive at a clinic, they would have to seek treatment elsewhere from a physician anyway,” Catania said.

Due to the fact that most sex education and resources are often found in one place, many youths do not receive the proper information and preparation they need, and end up participating in risky behavior.

While interventions of various kinds have been set up in these high risk communities, they have been either ineffective or too expensive to set up. Instead of implanting new interventions in these communities, Dolcini and Catania decided to ask the at-risk youth that had safely participated in sexual activity how they did so.

The response was immediate: They had not only received materials from school, but also from health clinics, their parents and their pastors. Success occurred when the resources were distributed to adult sources around the neighborhood, instead of having all the resources centralized.

Dolcini and Catania are confident in their theory that if the whole community worked together to combat this issue, then risky sexual behavior rates would drop significantly.

“This way, if one person is uncomfortable with talking to a student about something, they can be sent to someone more willing to talk,” Dolcini said.

The ultimate goal of Dolcini and Catania’s research is to develop intervention programs that model the mosaic approach to sexual health. Both researchers are confident that with this method, the number of cases these neighborhoods get daily will reduce.

This study was brought up to Anderson Duboise, external coordinator for the Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center at OSU. Duboise voiced his personal opinion on sexual health separately from the views of the Black Cultural Center.

“I think it’s not just about ethnicity or economic standing. I think it’s also about having positive influences and role models in your life,” Duboise said. “You need to have a solid foundation [about] your body and yourself.”

Duboise also believes it is important to note the environment that kids grow up in, as well as their age. Most are too young to make an appropriate decision regarding their sexuality, and should wait until they are mentally mature enough to make those decisions, he said.

Although the results have many factors attached to them, Dolcini argues that socioeconomic class was a factor they anticipated in their study.

“Socioeconomic status is definitely a contributing factor, but we’re not going to find the same data in more affluent or middle-class neighborhoods that we do in our study,” Dolcini said.

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