Promotion of Sexual Health Self-Efficacy through Gender-Transformative Intervention with Adolescent Boys

Abstract

This mixed-methods study examined how WiseGuyz, a gender-transformative healthy relationships program, can support positive sexual health self-efficacy (SHSE) among adolescents. 570 adolescent boys provided data on SHSE from before to after the program, and 20 adolescent boys participated in interviews and focus groups to discuss their sexual health education needs. Results showed that boys who participated in WiseGuyz reported a significant increase in SHSE from pretest to post-test and that WiseGuyz was different from typical school-based sexual health education in terms of content and facilitation and increasing program engagement. These findings indicate the potential for gender-transformative interventions in supporting positive SHSE.

Keywords:

• Adolescents
• gender-transformative
• healthy relationships
• sexual health self-efficacy
• mixed-methods
• WiseGuyz

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the Centre for Sexuality for their support of this research. The Male Role Norms Inventory-Adolescent was used with the permission of Dr. Ronald F. Levant.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Notes

1 Refers to male-identified youth between the ages of 12–18 years.

2 We note that the original SHPSES had 20 items, but one item from the sexual assault subscale was removed by the WiseGuyz team as it was perceived to be inappropriate for their population.

3 While this study originally included only focus groups, due to scheduling, individual interviews (n = 3) ended up being conducted in some cases because of no-shows from participants scheduled to participate in focus groups. Thus, in this section, we describe both interviews and focus groups.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by an Early Career Award to Dr. Exner-Cortens from Alberta Health Services/PolicyWise, and a Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada to Dr. Caroline Claussen.