Survey for the District’s Human Sexuality Curriculum Research Paper

The issues of unplanned pregnancy among the youth and the problem of sexual transmitted diseases among the students are rather controversial and require an immediate solution in the modern society. The process of working out, the development and analyzing of the district’s human sexuality-HIV/AIDS curriculum contributes to solving of the problem. That is why it is necessary to collect the required information for working out the curriculum. There are many ways to collect the information, and the most effective among them is the method of survey.

The most frequently used variants of surveys are questionnaires and interviews. The peculiarities of collecting the information on the topic of human sexuality influence the choice of the right approach to the problem. The results of this survey can be limited by the people’s necessity of presenting some personal information in the answers to the questions of the survey. That is why it is important to follow obligatory rules when composing the questionnaire and providing the survey.

It is necessary to provide suitable conditions for giving the anonymous answers to the questions because of the need to receive the most truthful information for the survey. Moreover, it is useful to pay attention to the adequate content of the questions. “For each question on your survey, ask yourself whether the respondent will have any difficulty answering the question truthfully. If there is some reason why they may not, consider rewording the question” (Trochim, 2006, Survey Research).

To avoid any other difficulties in understanding the requirements to the questionnaire, it can be essential to use structured formats of the questions. “Structured formats help the respondent to respond more easily and help the researcher to accumulate and summarize responses more efficiently” (Trochim, 2006, Survey Research). There are the possibilities to choose the most appropriate structured format. Furthermore, it is more suitable to use dichotomous questions in the questionnaire according to the peculiarities of the topic (Trochim, 2000).

The district’s human sexuality-HIV/AIDS curriculum should be worked out depending on such issues of the modern society as unplanned pregnancy among the young people, methods of preventing of teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and the lack of necessary information about the forms of contraception. The questions for the survey must reflect these problems and the results must be effective for working out the curriculum (Posner, 2003). Thus, the questions for the survey can be divided into several groups.

The first group of questions requires factual information about the age, gender and status or class standing of the interviewees to complete the quantitative characteristics. This information is necessary for analyzing of the level of physical maturity of the interviewee. The second group of questions is given in the form of dichotomous questions which require yes/no answers. The answers to these questions are necessary for analyzing the peculiarities of the sexual behavior of the young people and examining the level of their personal responsibility and self-control:

1. Do you support the idea of sexual abstinence? – Yes/No.
2. Have you the sexual experience with the partner? – Yes/No.
3. Do you use condoms as the form of contraception? – Yes/No.
4. Have you ever been pregnant? Has your girl-friend ever been pregnant? –Yes/No.
5. Have you ever been tested for HIV/AIDS? – Yes/No.

The third group of questions requires the information for analyzing the level of the youth’s theoretical knowledge on the problem. There are many sources from which young people can learn the information about the aspects of sexual life. Nevertheless, it is important analyze the sources which are the most influential and affect the youth sexual behaviour. It is also necessary to determine the sources about the forms of contraception and other methods of preventing pregnancy. Students must have the opportunity to choose among the variants of the sources with the help of which they can obtain the information about the methods of birth control and the peculiarities of the human sexuality. The possible variants of answers can be the following: parents, friends, classmates, books, Internet resources, television, articles in specialized journals, and classes in college.

The fourth group of questions deals with the issues of emotional, psychological and ethical aspects of the human sexuality. It is important to discover the occurrences of possible violent and abusive behavior of the partners, to reveal the causes and effects of emotional traumas of young people who had negative sexual experience or faced the incidents when people suffered from the human immunodeficiency virus. The possible questions can be as the following ones:

1. Have you ever been induced to sexual relations in the situation when you had no desire to do this?
2. Have you discussed your problem with your parents or your psychologist?

The questions from this group can be rather controversial but effective for contributing to the efficient survey. The results of the survey can be analyzed with the help of scaling (Trochim, 2006, Scaling).

The necessity of working out the surveys on the topic of young people sexuality and developing of the district’s human sexuality-HIV/AIDS curriculum is affected by a number of social and personal youth’s challenges which require be properly discussed and solved. The survey as the method of research is the most appropriate for analyzing of this problem.

References

1. Posner, G.I. (2003). Analyzing The Curriculum. New York: McGraw-Hill Humanities.
2. Trochim, W.M.K. (2000). The Research Methods Knowledge Base. Cincinnatti, OH: Atomic Dog Publishing.
3. Trochim, W.M.K. (2006). Survey Research. Web.
4. Trochim, W.M.K. (2006). Scaling. Web.