The effectiveness of the sexual development training program for the mothers of primary school students

This research was conducted to test the effectiveness of target-oriented sexual development policy of primary school student mothers and to investigate the opinions and knowledge levels of primary school student mothers about sexual development education. Personal information form as a data collection tool, opinion survey on sexual education and Sexual Education Program Knowledge Test (SEPKT). In the first part of the study, the opinions of 115 primary school mothers about sexual education and whether or not the Sexual Education Program Knowledge Test (SEPKT) differed or related to demographic variables were examined. The second part of the research; designed to test the effectiveness of the Sexual Education Program developed by the researcher. Sexual education program was used as independent variable and SEPKT was used as dependent variable. In addition, the frequency values of the opinion questionnaire responses (pretest / posttest) regarding sexual education of the experimental and control groups were given. The study was conducted with 30 participants consisting of mothers of elementary school students attending a public school in the 2018-2019 academic year. The sample of the study was formed by randomly assigning the experimental group (n = 15) and control group (n = 15) to the experimental group (n = 15). Then, the 8-session sexual training program was applied to the experimental group and post-test was applied. When the relational study data is analyzed; According to the preliminary test (n = 115), it was seen that most of the mothers (69%) stated that they could not provide sexual education to their children and 80% stated that they did not know how to give sexual education. In addition, 69% of children had difficulty in answering questions about sexuality. Another finding obtained from the first part of the study is the negative correlation between SEPKT scores and the age of the parents. At the same time, statistically significant differences were observed between the education level of the parents and SEPKT scores. In the second part of the research, which tested the effectiveness of sexual development education program; views on sexual education were found to increase positively in the post-test among the participants in the experimental group. The pre-test and post-test data of the SEPKT scores did not show a significant difference for the experimental and control groups, whereas the post-test showed a significant difference in favor of the experimental group. This differentiation shows that the sexual development education program is effective. In the comparison of SEPKT scores within the group, a significant difference was found in favor of the post-test in the pre-test and post-test data of the experimental group. The findings were discussed in detail in the literature.