Chinese Students’ Degree of Sex Education Requirement

Abstract

Through a survey about how much Chinese students know about

HIV/AIDS to find whether Chinese students need more comprehensive

sex education to extend their knowledge. The participants were

required to answer few questions in order to analyze the importance

of sex education for Chinese students. Then analyzed the level of

HIV/AIDS knowledge does participants have and collected their

opinions about whether school should provide sex education or not.

According to the result that we have already had, I can conclude

that most students have already had basic knowledge about HIV/AIDS,

but they most have confused when they met deeper knowledge of

HIV/AIDS. Also, almost all the participants believe that school

should provide sex education.

Introduction

Background
 In the world, about 36.9 million people living with

HIV and young people continued to demonstrate a high risk for HIV.

(HIV.gov) Limited access to comprehensive sex education, subsequent

lack of awareness, adolescents’ risk-taking behaviors, and

concerns about rights and confidentiality could be the main reasons

for this situation. In addition, there are many researches about

Chinese students’ lack of sex education which put them at risk.

According to the research, most schools in China don’t have sex

education and they always evade this topic in front of the

students. (General. 2016) Hence, I want to figure out how much do

Chinese students know about HIV/AIDS and inspect whether Chinese

students need comprehensive sex education to increase their

knowledge. In addition, the objectives of this research are Chinese

students in UC Davis.

Research Question
 What are the Chinese students’ perspectives of sex education

and their level of HIV/AIDS knowledge? Where do they receive sex

education? Whether they need sex education in school?

Literature Review

There are many studies about Chinese students need more sex

education and many Chinese schools don’t provide sex education.

One professor of Beijing Forestry University said that sex

education everywhere in China is blank. (General, 2016). It is

really weird because China is growing, and China holds the lead

places in many areas. However, many schools in China don’t even

have a sex education program. (Rehorn, 2017) What’s wrong with the

sex education?

Without comprehensive sex education, HIV/AIDS has expanded

among young people, especially in the 18-to-25 age group, and the

ratio reached up to 35 percent annual growth. (Yang, 2017) Hence,

sex education should be compulsory for all 300 million students in

China. Also, schools and management layers should listen to the

voices of young people in order to let them be the leader of the

classes. (Yang, 2017)

Method

Data Collection

The questionnaire was designed for Chinese students,

and it couldn’t avoid that there were some specialized words in

questionnaire. In order to make sure that every participant could

well understand all questions, some words were explained in

Chinese.

Overall, there are 11 questions which include

multiple choice and short-answer questions in the questionnaire.

All the questions in the questionnaire are required to answer. The

questions are divided into three main sections. The first section

collects the information about gender, sexual orientation, and

whether students receive systematic knowledge about HIV/AIDS in

school. The second section collects the level of HIV/AIDS knowledge

that students grasp. The third section collects the students’

attitude about having comprehensive sex education whether impact

the transmit of HIV/AIDS.

Five questions are included in the second section, showing the

HIV/AIDS knowledge level of Chinese students. For the third

section, participants should first answer where do they receive the

knowledge about HIV/AIDS. And the opinions about whether schools

should have sex education. At last, participants need to do a

multiple-choice question “After doing research, do you want to

learn more knowledge about HIV/AIDS online or somewhere?”.

Data Analysis

Data were presented by pie chart, histogram, and

short answers. I used descriptive statistics which included

frequencies, percentages, standard deviations in order to making

differences between students who have already received systematic

knowledge about HIV/AIDS and students who have superficial

knowledge about HIV/AIDS. Also, analyze Chinese students’ degree

of sex education requirement through these data.

Result

Totally, thirty Chinese students in UC Davis did this

questionnaire which include 12 male and 18 females. Of those, 24

(80%) were heterosexuality, 5 (16.7%) were homosexuality, and 1

(3.3%) was bisexuality.

Sexual Orientation

Heterosexuality Homosexuality
Bisexuality

Graph 1

What’s Your Sexual Orientation?

The percentage of students who have already received comprehensive

HIV/AIDS knowledge was 20% (6 students), and the percentage of

students who have superficial HIV/AIDS knowledge or don’t have any

HIV/AIDS knowledge was 80% (24 students). There are 19 (63.3%)

students were make mistake in choosing “Mosquitoes, ticks or other

blood-sucking insects may transmit HIV”, and there are 6 (20%)

students were thinking “Sharing toilets or social kissing with

someone who is HIV-positive may transmit HIV”. And after

summarizing other results of knowledge questions, there were 2

participants answering all correct; 25 participants answering

partially correct; 3 participants answering all wrong.

Knowledge of HIV/AIDS

Answer All Correct Partially Correct Incorrect

Graph 2

Students’ Knowledge of HIV/AIDS

In addition, 27% (8) students claim that they receive the knowledge

about HIV/AIDS in books; 20% (6) students claim they receive

HIV/AIDS knowledge in school; 40% (12) students claim they receive

the knowledge about HIV/AIDS online; 13% (4) students claim they

receive the knowledge about HIV/AIDS from peers.

Where do you receive the

knowledge about HIV/AIDS?

School Internet Peers Books

Graph 3

Where do you receive the knowledge about HIV/AIDS?

The attitude of learning knowledge about HIV/AIDS, 67% (20)

students believe that they will treat this thing seriously, and

other students think it is unnecessary to spend much time on it.

Also, 97% participants believe that school should provide sex

education.

Discussion

Through the students’ level of HIV/AIDS knowledge,

students’ attitudes toward taking comprehensive sex education, and

the comparisons between different HIV/AIDS knowledge reservations

students to indicate that most Chinese students need comprehensive

sex education to avoid the transmit of HIV/AIDS. Through the data,

participants who have already had systematic HIV/AIDS knowledge

have higher accuracy rate of answering questions than students who

have superficially HIV/AIDS knowledge. Most students make wrong

answers on the question “What kind of approaches do you think may

transmit HIV?”, and most students have no ideas on the question

“how HIV testing works?”. From the results, I found that many

participants have already had some basic knowledge about HIV/AIDS,

but they most had misconceptions when they met deeper questions.

Also, students have less knowledge about what protective measures

can be used to avoid getting HIV. In the survey, students are

required to answer at least two ways. However, most participants

only answer one correct answer “Using condom” and one irrelevant

answer. Another interesting thing is that most students receive

HIV/AIDS knowledge online or books instead on in school. It shows

that students want to learn knowledge about HIV/AIDS, but many

schools don’t provide comprehensive education about it. These

results provide useful information that Chinese students indeed to

learn some knowledge about HIV/AIDS because they need comprehensive

knowledge about it to eliminate the misunderstand about HIV/AIDS.

In addition, most students have barely and inaccurate knowledge

about the therapeutic methods for AIDS and how does HIV testing

work. This is a systemic process for people to know what HIV/AIDS

is, how does it transmit, how to figure out whether you infect it,

how to protect yourself in order to avoid transmitting, and how to

treat AIDS. Besides, many students have contradictory minds.

Although, almost all the students believe that taking in-depth sex

education will control the transmit of HIV/AIDS, there are also

have nearly 40 percent of participants express that they may not

learn more knowledge about HIV/AIDS in the future. From this

result, we can see that students don’t pay enough attention on

this thing. This may be the potential trouble in controlling the

transmit of HIV/AIDS.

Conclusion

Summary

Through this research, we could find that most

Chinese students in UC Davis need comprehensive sex education in

the future. They all have already known a few knowledges about

HIV/AIDS, but they still have lots of misunderstands about it. And

according to the comparison between students who have already had

learned HIV/AIDS knowledge before and students who haven’t had

HIV/AIDS knowledge before, we can conclude that Chinese students

really need sex education in school because it is necessary for

students to extend their knowledge of HIV/AIDS and avoid the

transmit of HIV/AIDS.

Limitations

This survey still has two limitations. The first one

is the sample size is small which may not reflect the true

situation. The second one is there are only Chinese participants in

UC Davis which is not extensive enough.

Future Research

In the future, there should be explore more on why

we need sex education and other factors or methods the reduce the

probability of transmitting HIV/AIDS. In addition, we could study

whether students learn sex education in school is an effective way

to spread HIV/AIDS knowledge. Also, in the future research we can

study what kind of educating method is the most acceptable for

students.

Reference

Tang W, Babu GR, Li J, et al. The difference between HIV and

syphilis prevalence and incidence cases: results from a cohort

study in Nanjing, China, 2008–2010. Retrieved

from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25249593
Wanli Yang. China Daily: Sex Education Needed in all Schools,

Experts say. 2017. Retrieved from

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-11/28/content_35087357.htm

New York State Department of publications. Questions and Answers about

HIV/AIDS. Retrieved

from https://www.health.ny.gov/publications/0213.pdf

Bo Wang, Sara Hertog, Ann Meier, Chaohua Lou, and Ersheng Gao. The

potential of comprehensive sex education in China: Findings from

Suburban Shanghai. Retrieved

from https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/article_files/

3106305.pdf