| dc.description.abstract | The role of male parents and their involvement is a very important phenomenon in influencing the sexual attitudes and behaviors of adolescent’s health. This study was carried out to investigate the role of male parents on sexual health education which was to create information that would direct policy formulation and implementation.
This study had three objectives that was, to determine the proportion of fathers in Gulu municipality engaged in sexual health education among adolescents living in Gulu municipality, to determine the approaches used by male parents on sexual health education among adolescents living in Gulu municipality and lastly to identify individual factors of male parents that influence sexual health education among adolescents living in Gulu municipality.
This study took on a cross sectional study design which was both analytical and descriptive and both qualitative and quantitative data was collected with the use of semi structured questionnaires and focus group discussions. The data that was collected using semi structured questionnaires was from three hundred sixty four (n=364) respondents and was analyzed using SPSS and the findings were presented according to the objectives of the study.
It was found that male parents do conduct sexual health education for their children to a greater extent and the main approach used was said to be the individual approach and the most influential individual factors being the age, marital status and the employment status of the male parent. Data analysis also indicated that (57.3%) of the male parents reported that to a greater extent they are involved in carrying out sexual health education. When compared with the marital status, the comparison displayed a Pearson chi-square value of 19.001 and pvalue of 0.001 meaning that there is a statistically significant relationship at 95% level of confidence between male parents' extent of involvement in sexual health education and their marital status.
For the individual factors the male Parents aged between 35 to 40 years had statistically significantly (pvalue = 0.017) reduced odds of saying they are involved in sexual health education compared to those aged between 26 and 30 years. The Married male parents were found to be 19.5 times more likely to say they are involved in the sexual health education compared to single parents, further for those Partly employed male parents had higher odds of saying they are involved in the sexual health education as compared to fully employed parents with 2.6 times than the fully employed.
The study concluded that male parents could be a good source of sexual health education but most of them felt that they needed more time with their children to install morals in them and that involving fathers would be an effective means of preventing bad sexual practices by adolescents and creating messages to fathers would enable them talk to their children.
The study recommends that children should have a good relationship with their male parents so that communication to them becomes easier, since adolescents need more information, male parents should be equipped with resources to avail with their children which is in relation to a study done in Atlanta(Murray D ,et al 2004) where an intervention was being carried out and the fathers recommended that since fathers had never talked to their children about sexual matters, they needed more time to develop skills for those discussions. | en_US |
