ACCESSIBILITY OF ADOLESCENTS TO SOURCES OF INFORMATION ON SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH

Introduction: adolescence is a phase that entails biopsychosocial changes with specific emotional and behavioral impact on sexual and reproductive health of both sexes. The World Health Organization considers adolescents to be the ages from 10 to 19 years. Chronologically this is important for epidemiological research, for development of public health policies , to define programs and specific actions for this audience. The concern with the sexual and reproductive health of adolescents is due to early onset of sexual activity, which contributes to expose these young people to the risks of unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Objective: to identify the sources of information used by adolescents in public schools about sexuality and reproduction. Methods: descriptive quantitative study. There were 90 Semi-structured interviews applied to adolescents with predominant age between 16 and 19 years old from the second year of high school in a Public School located in the urban periphery of a capital in the northeast of Brazil. Results: it was observed that the adolescents of this study has a relatively high accessibility to the educational activities in the area of sexual and reproductive health. The school was the main area cited by the participants of the study. As for the search for information on the subject, friends are the most sought after by adolescents. Afterwards, the most often cited are family members. The majority of the adolescents said that the source of information most sought was television (35.5%), followed by the internet, books and magazines. Contraception was practiced by only 14 (36.9%) of the adolescents. Conclusion: this study points to the school as the main area of participation in educational activities on sexual and reproductive health among adolescents, in addition to friends, television and the internet