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Sexual health promotion aimed at men who have sex with men (MSM) is not achieving its objective of reducing the incidence of new infections of sexually transmitted diseases, notably HIV/AIDS, in the MSM population. The paper aims to raise awareness of possible unintended consequences when using visual culture and advertising techniques in the field of sexual (and other) health promotion and public health messages.

Using critical textual analysis and drawing on visual culture methodology the approach is to critique current practice and suggest alternative ways to approach gay men's sexual health which are not predicated on a “model” gay man.

Men who have sex with men (MSM) are constructed through sexual health promotion (SHP) literature as young, hedonistic and irrational which may serve to distance the very audience it seeks to attract and address. What may at first appear to be a targeted and helpful initiative to raise awareness may inadvertently have the simultaneous and unanticipated effect of “selling” unsafe sex rather than promoting safe sex. This is because, first, the use of sexual imagery designed to attract attention works in unanticipated ways. Second, MSM are constructed through the images and language used in ways that may be at best unhelpful and potentially quite harmful.

There are many different approaches and interventions in this field and the criticisms here may not be applicable to many of the other sources of health promotion awareness campaigns. Future research could certainly be conducted in other fields of health promotion and public health issues such as obesity, drug and alcohol abuse and smoking cessation.

Health promotion practice should beware of depicting their audience in stereotypical ways. MSM could be constructed far more positively as role models to be followed instead of bad examples to be avoided.

The methodology is new to this field and the findings provide an original basis for criticism of advertising techniques which have until now formed the basis of this type of public awareness‐raising.

Presents the results of an investigation into effective methods of peer‐led sexual health promotion work with young gay and bisexual men. The study recruited a group of young gay and bisexual men from Southampton who underwent training to participate in a peer‐led sexual health intervention in which they conducted one‐to‐one interviews with a selection of their peers. Reports briefly on the key learning to arise from the process of recruiting and training peer educators, and in greater depth concerning the quasi‐experimental evaluation of the intervention the peer educators participated in to promote sexual health. The study found that rapport and familiarity between project workers and potential recruits aided the recruitment process, and that informal, confidence‐building activities were key factors in the effectiveness of the peer educators’ training. The peer educators were most effective in terms of information provision, but weaker on the exploration of attitudes and beliefs, or the encouragement of safer sexual behaviour. The advantages associated with the intervention included its ability to target individuals in a range of community settings, to stimulate in‐depth discussion about sexual health, to identify individual needs and to facilitate outcome evaluation over time.

This paper seeks to explore the theoretical bases for teacher‐delivered and peer‐delivered sexual health promotion and education.

The first section briefly outlines the main theories informing sexual health interventions for young people, and the second discusses their implications for modes of delivery.

Most interventions that claim to be theoretically based draw on social‐psychological cognition theories. Other programmes aim to develop self‐esteem and/or empowerment, while the two main sociological ideas underpinning sexual health programmes are the gendered construction of sexuality and the diffusion of innovations.

More research is necessary to clarify the mechanisms by which sexual health promotion works, which in turn should contribute to more empirically based theory.

If theoretical ideas are to be translated into potentially effective programmes, the specific features of the setting, target group and those delivering the programme must be taken into account.

This paper compares the theoretical justifications for different modes of delivering sexual health promotion, through outreach peer educators, formal school‐based peer educators and teachers.

Digital technology has great potential for educating today’s digitally oriented adolescents on health. In particular, digital health gamified learning can make the promotion of the sexual well-being of adolescents more effective. Although venereal diseases such as HIV/AIDS have become a greater problem in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries than in any country outside of Africa, little is publicly known about the development of gamified learning for use in counter-measures. This paper aims to address that deficit by presenting the process of developing one such game. The paper highlights how the “My Future Begins Today” game for sexual health education was developed, evaluated and refined in the real-world of low-tech settings and made improvements based on the response of users.

Design-based research (DBR) was used to guide the design, develop, test and refine the digital game in iterative cycles. The evaluation of the effectiveness of iterations of the game was done using adolescent sexual health literacy tests and the validated Motivation, Attitude, Knowledge and Engagement framework, the authors developed based on existing approaches. That framework combines the elements of motivation, attitude, knowledge and engagement, effectiveness was evaluated based on the game’s ability to motivate students, improve their attitudes, increase their acquisition of knowledge and engage them in learning self-rating surveys and interviews. The whole process of game design, testing, evaluation and refinement were underpinned by the activity theory, DBR and participatory design (PD) research.

Participants in the gamified learning platforms demonstrated higher average scores on their post-tests than their counterparts subjected to the traditional teaching classroom. Also, gamified learning groups commented positively on the effectiveness of their instructional approach than their counterparts in the traditional learning group. The stakeholders’ involvement in developing gamified learning provided a good understanding of the importance of the game to the adolescent students and how it was going to be used to address the problem identified. The application of PD contributed to the effectiveness of the game. It involved various actors from various fields who were relevant to the game. Also, engaging targeted users from the beginning resulted in the creation of a better correspondence with the preferences of end-users.

This study has contributed to a better understanding of sex education and knowledge in the area of adolescent reproductive health issues, using developed innovative game mechanics features and its applicability in low-tech settings.

The study will be a recommendation for future researchers in applying this gamified learning concept and its suitability in their teaching practice, particularly regarding sexual health education and adolescent reproductive health issues in low-tech settings of SSA.

Adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections including HIV are important public health issues in many countries around the world. The trend is escalating among adolescents of younger ages. Many programmes aim to prevent adolescent sexual risk behaviours associated with these health outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyse methodological and substantive features of research on interventions to delay the initiation of sexual intercourse and prevent other sexual risk behaviours among early adolescents.

The review includes studies published between 2006 and 2017 that appear in Thai and international databases.

A total of 33 studies met specified review criteria. Of the studies reviewed, 14 used randomized control designs, 16 used quasi-experimental designs and three used a pre-test, post-test design. Sample sizes ranged from 64 to 4,776 subjects; nearly two-thirds of the studies (n = 22) included multiple follow-up surveys. The programmes evaluated in these studies can be grouped into three categories: abstinence-based sexuality education programmes (n = 12), comprehensive sexuality education programmes (n = 13) and youth development programmes designed for early adolescents (n = 10). In total, 22 programmes reviewed were effective in changing targeted adolescent psychosocial and/or behavioural outcomes.

One of the limitations encountered in this study involved the search in library databases published only in Thai and English. Due to the limitation of searching library databases included in the review that reported the effects and differences among the included studies. Moreover, the search included publications consisted of heterogeneous designs and purpose with reports of different types of outcomes made it impossible to compare effect sizes.

The knowledge gained can be used to design and implement effective sexual health promotion programmes for early adolescents. Moreover, the findings can be applied as a guideline for health provider working in a schools, communities and adolescent health services. Recommendations for future studies are needed to consider methodological and substantive characteristics as well as the people who are involved in youth sexual health outcomes.

It is necessary for government to develop a policy for encouraging parents to be aware and participate in solving the problems.

The review indicated that the positive effects of parental involvement and technology media as a programme material on the psychosocial and behavioural outcomes.

The aim of this small‐scale focus group study is to explore the impact the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine has on attitudes towards HPV, cervical cancer and sexual risk taking amongst university students in the UK.

Participants were recruited through advertisements placed on notice boards throughout the campus of the University of Leeds. The study sampled purposively to obtain two groups of ten men and two groups of ten women. A total of 34 people attended the sessions. The missing participants gave no reason for the absence. Those who agreed to take part were aged 19‐24 and were from a range of academic courses. Ethical approval was sought and approved by the Medical School Ethics Committee at the University of Leeds.

Participants saw HPV as being distinct from genital warts. This led to a duality in their view of the vaccine, which they saw as a cancer vaccine for schoolgirls and as an STI vaccine in relation to people of their own age, and thus believed it would cause sexual complacency among young adults. There was a fear that the HPV vaccine would reinforce gender bias, reinforcing the idea that females are responsible for sexual health. They maintained that mass media campaigns were more effective than sex education for improving sexual health knowledge and practices.

With the exception of chlamydia screening, this age group tends to be ignored in sexual health promotion campaigns. This small‐scale study provides insights that can inform larger studies and help tailor future health education campaigns on HPV for this audience.

Sexual health as a concept, particularly for the over 50s, is not seen as sexy. A large proportion of policy and subsequent resources are directed at young people, specifically around sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and preventing teenage pregnancy. Consequently, the sexual health needs of the over 50s are marginalised at best or at worst completely forgotten. This article describes the process behind developing a sexual health promotion campaign aimed at the over 50s in Manchester.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of abstinence-based sexual education programs delivered in parallel to Thai parents and their early adolescent daughters to promote sexual abstinence and improve communication regarding sexual topics between them and their parents.

A quasi-experimental design included groups of parent/daughter dyads; Group 1 (controls) (n=40), Group 2 Adolescent Program (n=40) and Group 3 Adolescent Parent Program (APP) (n=42). Outcome measures included parent–adolescent communications and adolescents’ sexual abstinence cognitions and intent to abstain from sexual behaviors, measured at five and nine weeks post-programs.

Generalized estimating equation analyses indicated that the dual program (APP) was more effective in increasing parental communication with their daughters compared with Group 1 (p-value<0.05) and only the daughters in the APP program reported more positive subjective norms, sense of perceived behavioral control and intent to abstain than did Group 1 (p-value<0.05).

The overarching goal of supporting the development of family environments where female adolescents are able to talk about sexuality is essential for adolescent sexual health promotion. The data provide further evidence that a dual program with simultaneous parent and female adolescent interactive activities over three sessions is superior compared with programs that target either the parents or the adolescents only. Hence, further replication with more parent–daughter dyads and then within more diverse cultures and populations is warranted. Developing and testing a similarly structured program for parents and sons is also required.

Practitioners are under constant pressure to evaluate their work. In the current environment, health professionals frequently have limited time and financial resources, and opportunities for using existing data sets must be exploited. Routinely collected data provide a potentially useful resource for use in this context. The aim of this paper is to discuss the potential uses of routinely collected data in the evaluation of health promotion interventions. Opportunities for and limitations of routine data are discussed, drawing on examples primarily from the field of sexual health, to demonstrate principles which are also relevant in other areas of health care.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how school-based sexuality education has had a long and troubled history of exclusionary pedagogical practices that have negatively affected such populations as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer (LGBTQ) individuals, people of color, and the disabled. The social ecological model is introduced as a way of offering sexuality educators and school administrators a way of thinking more broadly about how to achieve sexual health through sexuality education efforts inside and outside of the school environment.

This paper uses critical analysis of current and historical school-based sexuality education methods and curricula used in the USA. Authors use both academic journals and their own expertise/experience teaching sexuality education in the USA to analyze and critique the sources of sexuality education information and curricula used in schools.

Historically, sexuality education in school settings in the USA has been biased and has generally not offered an educational experience fostering sexual health for all students. There are now welcome signs of reform and movement toward a more inclusive and progressive approach, but there is still some way to go. Sexuality education programs in schools need to be further and fundamentally reformed to do more to foster sexual health particularly for LGBTQ individuals, students of color, and people with disabilities.

This paper offers sexuality educators ways of addressing structural issues within the sexuality education curriculum to better serve all students to increase the quality of their sexual health. Integrating critical pedagogy and anti-oppressive education can increase students’ sexual health along physical, social, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions.

This paper provides historical analysis along with the identification of structural difficulties in the sexuality education curriculum and proposes both critical pedagogy and anti-oppressive education as ways of addressing sex and relationships education.