Tyler James is an undergraduate UF Scholar in Geography with Dr Sadie J. Ryan. On October 26th, he presented a poster on the the first of his projects at the UF Fall Undergraduate Research Symposium: James, T., and Ryan, S.J. STI knowledge in college students: Identifying targets for safer sex education.
Extract of Introduction:
In the United States, young adults and adolescents aged 15 to 24 have the highest incidence of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). This highlights the need to understand the sexual risk behaviors of this age group to produce effective STI interventions. In the field of health education, theoretical frameworks are used to describe the adoption of health behaviors. One of the oldest frameworks applied to sexual health behaviors is the Health Belief Model (HBM), which posits that behavioral adoption depends on perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, perceived benefits, perceived barriers, a cue to action, and self-efficacy (Strecher & Rosenstock, 1997). In order to identify college student characteristics (demographic and behavioral), needing additional safer sex education, we analyzed survey results from the UF Sexual Health Student Survey of 2009.