Knowledge and affective-sexual education congruence in people with ID
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Abstract
In education of people with intellectual disability (ID) it is important that the main agents involved (users, parents and professionals working with them) have common criteria about educational objectives in general, and especially, in sexuality. However, the three perspectives do not always coincide with the consequences of it. Taking into account the importance of identifying common needs and goals, we propose this work with the objective of knowing the degree of agreement between: 1) the knowledge that users have about sexuality and the attribution their parents and professionals made about them and 2) the opinion of parents, professionals and users on the need to provide/receive affective-sexual education. For this, 92 adults with ID (45.6% women, 54.4% men) with ages between 19 and 67 year old (M=37.5) and their parents and professionals, completed an instrument where they were asked about knowledge about sexuality and the interest of receiving training in affective-sexual education. Results indicate agreement respect to sexuality knowledge of 36.7% between parents and users and 58.4% between professionals and users. Regarding the agreement of the need to receive training in affective-sexual education, this was 75.5% between parents and users and 88.5% between professionals and users. The agreement between the three regarding this issue was high (74.7%). From these results we can conclude that professionals are better aware of the needs, skills and knowledge of the users than their own parents are but, all have in common the identification of the need to introduce in a standardized way affective-sexual education in this group.
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