Nursing students' attitudes and beliefs towards addressing sexual health: A multicentre study and latent class analysis

Background

To provide competent and respectful sexual health care, a critical and comprehensive assessment of students' attitudes towards sexuality is needed, which implies using reliable and valid questionnaires.

Aim

To assess whether the extended version of the Students Attitude Towards Addressing Sexual Health (SA-SH-Ext) provides different, additional information about students' attitudes towards providing sexual healthcare compared to the Sexual Attitude and Beliefs Survey (SABS), to explore SA-SH-Ext potential response patterns through latent class analysis and to assess students' attitudes towards providing sexual healthcare and evaluate the differences in their attitudes to the cultural background and sociodemographic characteristics.

Design

Multicentre, descriptive, analytical, comparative, and correlational cross-sectional study at three nursing faculties.

Participants

Nursing students n = 514 (Serbia n = 180, Poland n = 150 and Lithuania n = 184).

Methods

A general questionnaire for obtaining sociodemographic data, SA-SH-Ext and SABS were used as students' report measures.

Results

One part of the variance of each instrument does not overlap with the other, indicating that these instruments, in addition to the shared variance, provide different, additional information. A solution with three latent classes was found in the domain of responses to the SA-SH-Ext items. The response pattern placed nursing students in the class Comfortable and prepared in some situations, and the SABS score revealed students' moderately positive attitudes towards providing sexual healthcare. Significantly more conservative attitudes were demonstrated by students from Poland, those identifying their religious affiliation as Catholic and females, while first-year students showed more positive attitudes than those in later years of study.

Conclusions

The SA-SH-Ext and SABS enable a reliable and quick assessment of nursing students' comfort and competence in providing sexual healthcare. However, the differences in students' attitudes towards sexuality concerning belonging to a specific group imply a need for curriculum redesign and facilitating students to be more open to communication about sexuality with people with mental illnesses and intellectual and physical disabilities.