Senior school students' experiences and opinions of school-based HIV-AIDS education

This article reports the findings from the second part of a two-stage study that used both qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate the communication context of school-based HIV-AIDS education in state secondary schools in metropolitan and rural areas of New South Wales. The quantitative data are here described, focusing on a sample of 1005 Year 12 students' responses to a self-administered questionnaire. The data suggest that the students strongly supported the general idea of school-based HIV-AIDS education, but found current offerings lacking in several respects. Students identified a strong need for information about how HIV and AIDS affect the body, for more information about sexually transmissible diseases other than HIV-AIDS, for people with HIV themselves and experts in the field to provide education sessions, and for more small-group discussions. Rural students and those students from schools located in the outer western suburbs of Sydney in particular reported that they had insufficient access to the modes of information that they most preferred. There were some important differences between the responses of female and male students and between the responses of students from different ethnic groups, suggesting that these factors also need acknowledgment when school-based programs are designed for young people.