Sexual and Reproductive Health Knowledge of In-school Adolescents: A Comparative Study of Visually Impaired and Non-visually Impaired Students

Abstract

Adolescents’ Sexual and reproductive health (SRH) knowledge is important for preventing SRH problems and enabling young people to live a healthy sexual and reproductive life. This study assessed the differences in SRH knowledge between the visually impaired (VI) and non-visually impaired (N-VI) adolescents; and examined the factors contributing to the differences between the two groups. The study was conducted in Ondo State, Nigeria using a multi-stage sampling technique to select 394 visually impaired and non-visually impaired in-school adolescents aged 15-19 years. Quantitative data were collected using Open Data Kit (ODK). Models were fitted with Ordered Logistic Regression (OLR) using Stata 14. Results showed that 89% of N-VI compared with 66% of VI had good access to SRH information, while 63.4% of the VI and 40.3% of N-VI had poor SRH knowledge. Students with good access to information were more likely to have a better SRH knowledge, although the relationship is stronger for the N-VI than for the VI. The OLR results further showed that the respondents who had good access to information were about 116% more likely to have good SRH knowledge than their counterparts with poor access to information (OR = 2.163; C1:1.41–3.32). Also, the likelihood of the N-VI having good SRH knowledge more than doubled (138% more) that of the VI (OR = 2.377; C1:1.14 – 4.00). Extra-curricular activities also increased the likelihood of good SRH knowledge. The study therefore recommends advocacy efforts to provide adolescents with increased SRH knowledge with special focus on VI.