Advocating for schools to provide effective HIV and sexuality education: a case study in how social service organizations working in coalition can (and should) affect sustained policy change

Parents' attitudes towards the content of sex education in the USA: Associations with religiosity and political orientation

While most parents support their adolescents receiving school-based sex education, there is variability in which sex education topics receive the most support from parents. Conservative political orientation and greater religiosity have been independently associated with parents' lack of support for school-based sex education; however, no studies have examined the intersection of these two factors. The three goals of this study were to: 1) identify how specific sexual education topics cluster together to form content areas; 2) examine if religiosity and political orientation are uniquely associated with these content areas; and 3) examine if political orientation moderates the relationship between parents' religiosity and their perceived importance for the specific sex education content areas. Participants were a national sample of 881 US parents. The sex education topics clustered into three content areas: Factual Knowledge (e.g., STI transmission), Practical Skills (e.g., how to access condoms), and Pleasure and Identity (e.g., pleasurable aspects of sex). Politically conservative and more religious parents reported the lowest perceived importance for each content area. Importantly, these main effects were qualified by a significant interaction: parents who reported both political conservativism and high levels of religiosity reported the lowest perceived importance for these three content areas being taught.

Conflict transformation, stigma, and HIV-preventive structural change

Over the prior decade, structural change efforts have become an important component of community-based HIV prevention initiatives. However, these efforts may not succeed when structural change initiatives encounter political resistance or invoke conflicting values, which may be likely when changes are intended to benefit a stigmatized population. The current study sought to examine the impact of target population stigma on the ability of 13 community coalitions to achieve structural change objectives. Results indicated that coalitions working on behalf of highly stigmatized populations had to abandon objectives more often than did coalitions working for less stigmatized populations because of external opposition to coalition objectives and resultant internal conflict over goals. Those coalitions that were most successful in meeting external challenges used opposition and conflict as transformative occasions by targeting conflicts directly and attempting to neutralize oppositional groups or turn them into strategic allies; less successful coalitions working on behalf of stigmatized groups struggled to determine an appropriate response to opposition. The role of conflict transformation as a success strategy for working on behalf of stigmatized groups is discussed.