Rural Adolescents: Parental Communication on Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters in Jimma Zone, Southwest Ethiopia

There are very limited evidences showing the status of adolescent-parent communication in rural areas of Ethiopia as most of the studies focus in urban areas and were school-based. Therefore, this study intends to determine the adolescent-parent communication on sexual and reproductive health matters and its determinants among rural adolescents in Jimma Zone, Southwest Ethiopia.

Community-based cross-sectional study design was employed using the multistage sampling technique. Structured questionnaire was used to collect the data. The data was cleaned and entered into Epi data version 3.1 and exported to SPSS version 23 for descriptive and regression analysis.

From 833 adolescents participated in the study, only 364 (43.7%) of them had ever discussed sexual and reproductive health matters of which males represent 196 (53.8%) followed by females 168 (46.2%). Among these, only 35 (9.6%) had discussed with their mother, and 24 (6.6%) had discussed with their father. The proportion of adolescents who communicated with their parents on sexual and reproductive health issues was 364 (43.7%). Multivariable logistic regression analysis indicated that never getting information on SRH issues (AOR = 0.5, 95% CI, 0.4-0.8) and particularly on sexually transmitted infections (AOR = 0.5, 95% CI, 0.4-0.7) and unknowing the period in which there is a possibility to be pregnant for a girl (AOR = 0.2, 95% CI, 0.04-0.9) were found to be independent factors affecting adolescent-parental communication negatively.

This study's result implies that the majority of the adolescents in the rural area were not communicating with their parents about sexual and reproductive health issues. However, most of them knew about different sexual and reproductive health services and where they could be found. Therefore, the provision of detailed information on the importance of communication with their parents on such a sensitive issue is suggested. Further research is needed to identify the barrier from the parents' side.