Sex education: analysis of teacher’s and future teacher’s conceptions from 12 countries of Europe, Africa and Middle East

School Sex Education is nowadays an important public health issue as it concerns not only youth AIDS prevention (and other sexually transmitted infections) and adolescent pregnancy prevention but also interpersonal relationships and psychosocial issues. Therefore school sex education contributes to promote better citizenship. The European FP6 Biohead-Citizen research project aims at understanding how biology, health and environmental education can contribute to improving citizenship. It analyses the social representations and practices of teachers in several countries, focusing on differences in conceptions related to controlled parameters (e.g. social context, religion, gender). In this communication we analyse teachers’ and future teachers’ conceptions about sex education by using a questionnaire that we designed and tested during the first year of the project. It was applied to 6379 teachers and future teachers from 12 countries and we used standard statistical multivariate methods to investigate the structure of this complex dataset, with special focus on the importance of personal and socio-cultural representations. The results show that teachers’ conceptions and future teachers’ conceptions clearly correlate to religion, especially to the level of belief in God and the level of religious practices. It was also found that the level of teaching (primary versus secondary school) correlates to conceptions on sex education.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - PTDC/CED/65224/2006, CIFPEC (unidade de investigação 16/644)European project FP6 “Biohead-Citizen” CIT2-CT-2004-50601