Sex 101: a rapid review of research in the United States on the impacts of college sexual health curricula

ABSTRACT

Comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) has been shown to have a wide range of positive impacts for K-12 students. Despite its demonstrated benefits, many K-12 students in the USA do not receive CSE. Because of this, college may be an opportune time to teach this information. However, little is known about the impact of CSE in institutions of higher education. To synthesise knowledge about the impacts of college-level sexual health courses in the USA, a review of the topic was conducted. A review searching Ebscohost, ProQuest, PubMed, and Google Scholar was undertaken. Following the search, a second coder reviewed the articles to confirm eligibility. 13 articles, published between 2001 and 2020, met the inclusion criteria and were included in the review. A wide range of outcomes were reported. These included increased health promoting behaviours, less homophobic and judgemental attitudes around sexuality, improved communication and relationships, and increased understanding of sexual violence. College sexual health courses have high potential efficacy to provide CSE and fill gaps in US students’ sexual health knowledge. Future research should corroborate the existing outcomes using randomisation and more diverse samples, and examine whether these courses are effective in preventing sexual assault.

KEYWORDS:

• Comprehensive sexuality education
• college
• review
• qualitative
• quantitative

Acknowledgments

We thank Alex Junker (Institute of Human Nutrition, Columbia University Irving Medical Center) for their conceptual and editorial review of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

At the time of writing, JSH was supported in part by funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development under grant number P2CHD058486, awarded to the Columbia Population Research Center. SNB and ALC did not receive grant funding to support this work. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the US National Institutes of Health.