Congruence in reported frequency of parent-adolescent sexual health communication: A study from Mexico

Most studies on parent-adolescent sexual health communication come from developed countries and are based on either parents' or children's reports. In developing countries, there is little evidence about the agreement among reports of all parties involved in parent-adolescent sexual health communication.

The objective of this study is to explore the congruence (agreement) between adolescents and their parents about how frequently they discuss on selected sexual health topics.

A total of 1606 parent-adolescent dyads of adolescents attending the first year in public high schools and their parents, in Morelos, Mexico were sampled in this study.

The participants completed a self-administered questionnaire that included the frequency of parent-adolescent communication about eight sexual health topics. An ordinal logistic threshold model was used to estimate intra-class correlation coefficients within parent-adolescent dyads (as a measure of congruence) and to test if thresholds were equal between parents and adolescents.

Congruence in reported frequency of parent-adolescent sexual health communication ranged from 0.205 (menstruation) to 0.307 (condoms) for mother-adolescent dyads, and from 0.103 (ejaculation) to 0.380 (condoms) for father-adolescent dyads. The thresholds (i.e., the cutoff points that define the categories in the observed ordinal variable) differed between parents and adolescents for each of the sexual health topics explored (p<0.05 for father-adolescent dyads and p<0.001 for mother-adolescent dyads).

Our findings suggest a low congruence between parents' and adolescents' reports on parent-adolescent sexual health communication. This might be due to interpretation of frequency and intensity of sexual health communication which differs between parents and adolescents.