AHRC New York City continues its third year of involvement with Project SHINE. Project SHINE aims to address inequities in sexual health by ensuring accessible education and health services for youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities aged 16–24 and the people who support them. We are proud to share Project SHINE’s second research publication, “Youth and Parent Perspectives on Sexual Health Education for People with Intellectual Disabilities,” which speaks to the experiences of youth with disabilities, professionals, and caregivers.
Access the full text of the article here and find the abstract below. We look forward to sharing the official launch of Project SHINE later in the Fall or early Winter.
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.
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