Attitudes towards sexual health education in schools: A national survey of parents in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
School-based sexual health education plays a key role in providing young people with the information, motivation, and skills needed to enhance their sexual health. However, the extent and quality of sexual health education curricula varies across Canada. Though parents’ support is often considered when making curricular decisions, there is limited data examining parental attitudes towards sexual health education across Canada. In the current study, we examined parental attitudes towards school-based sexual health education in a national sample of Canadian parents. Using an online survey, we examined overall support for the inclusion of sexual health education in schools, perceived quality of the sexual health education children received, assessed support for 33 sexual health education topics, and determined if parental support varied across geographic regions. Participants were 2,000 parents with children attending elementary and/or secondary school in Canada. The majority of parents (85%) agreed that sexual health education should be taught in the schools. Support was high across all regions in Canada, ranging from 82% in Ontario to 91% in the Atlantic provinces. However, significantly fewer parents in Ontario and Quebec supported school-based sexual health education compared to other regions. Overall, parents want a wide variety of topics included in school-based sexual health education and support the teaching of foundational topics in the early and middle school grades. The current study is the first to use a national sample to examine parents’ attitudes towards sexual health education in schools. Results can inform provincial/territorial health education policies and national sexual health promotion strategies.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".