Comprehensive Sexuality Education Improves Primary Students' Explicit and Implicit Attitudes Toward Homosexuality

Li Hong; Xiangyu He; Lian Xue; Lingfeng Guo; Wenli Liu

doi:10.1080/19317611.2022.2067282

Comprehensive Sexuality Education Improves Primary Students' Explicit and Implicit Attitudes Toward Homosexuality

Int J Sex Health. 2022 Apr 27;34(3):503-520. doi: 10.1080/19317611.2022.2067282. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Li Hong¹, Xiangyu He¹, Lian Xue¹, Lingfeng Guo², Wenli Liu^{2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
² Collaborative Innovation Center of Assessment for Basic Education Quality, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
³ Faculty of Psychology, State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.

Abstract

Comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) is a curriculum-based process that is inclusive to gender and sexual orientation. We used the attitude toward homosexuality scale and the single category implicit association test (SC-IAT) to measure differences between explicit and implicit attitudes toward homosexuality between migrant children with 6 years CSE learning experience (experimental group, N = 70) and those without (control group, N = 80). We found that the experimental group had more positive explicit and implicit attitudes toward homosexuality than the control group. In conclusion, CSE is a useful process for improving the explicit and implicit attitudes of migrant children toward homosexuality.

Keywords: Comprehensive sexuality education; SC-IAT; explicit attitude; homosexuality; implicit attitude.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Beijing Normal University under grant number 2019-01-113-BZK01; and the Ford Foundation under Grant number 1120-1817.