Methodological strategies for evaluating sex education. A proposal based on Latin American experiences

Abstract

Over the last few decades, as part of the progress in the agenda of sexual rights and gender equality, many Latin American countries have enacted new laws and regulations to implement specific Sexual Education programs in schools. At the same time, the Social Sciences have examined these new policies, assessing their scope and limitations in a growing body of research. In our study, we review these recent empirical investigations considering two types of comparative strategies: international and sub-national. That is, comparisons of how sexual education was implemented in different Latin American countries and in different contexts (regions, institutions, among others) within the same country. We found that most of these studies use only one type of methodological approach (document analysis, interviews, surveys, among other) from a mostly descriptive approach (without exploring the explanatory incidence of different variables). Few evaluate the actual practices that take place beyond the normative discourse or the opinions of intervening social actors (e.g., officials, principals, teachers, among others). Given these limitations, we propose a different, more holistic method to assess the implementation of sexual education in different contexts. Using an experimental approach, our aim is to examine the interactions between the normative formulation of a program, the practices of the actors that implement it, and the conditioning factors of their context. We believe that this methodological approach can enrich the evaluation of sexual education programs in particular and public policies in general.