Research in human sexuality education

Since human sexuality courses are relatively recent additions to most U.S. medical school curricula, there are no established procedures for evaluating the courses. The purpose of this study was to test medical students' attitudes toward concepts in sexuality before and after a 5-day sexuality course using the semantic differential. The concepts students rated were "my sexuality", "masturbation", "homosexuality", and "my role in understanding sexual problems". Post-test scores were subtracted from pre-test scores and analysed by multivariate analysis of variance testing for significant difference from zero. Ninety-six second-year medical students completed the pre- and post-semantic differential tests. The changes between the pre- and post-tests were significant at the 0-001 level for all four concepts with the concept "homosexuality" showing the greatest change. The study suggests the semantic differential may be an effective instrument in assessing attitude changes. It also suggests the teaching techniques used in human sexuality courses may be successfully applied to other areas of medical education.