Special education teachers’ attitudes towards teaching sex education to students with intellectual disabilities in Malaysia

Abstract

All children have the right to be adequately informed about sex and sexuality, while the sex education for students with intellectual disabilities in Malaysia is limited. Teachers’ attitudes towards sex education determine the goals and process of implementing sex education programmes. The study aimed to investigate special education teachers’ attitudes towards sex education for children with intellectual disabilities in Malaysia. A total of 179 special education teachers participated in the study and we found special education teachers had a positive attitude towards sex education in general for intellectual disabilities in Malaysia. And the influencing factors of special education teachers’ attitude were age, degree of education, teachers’ teaching qualification, teachers’ experience of sex education for students, sex education training, teachers’ teaching age and school location.

Keywords:

• Special education teachers’ attitudes
• sex education
• children with intellectual disabilities

Ethical approval statement

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent statement

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated and analysed about this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Youth Project of Beijing Education Science 14th Five-Year Plan [grant number BECA22129] and the Open Project Programme of Gungdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Development and Education for Special Needs Children [grant number TJ202102].