A Study on Sexual Awareness and Sexual Behaviors among Middle School Students

중학생의 성 의식과 성 행동에 관한 연구

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the gender, grade and school type of middle school students made any differences to their sexual awareness and sexual behaviors in an effort to lay the groundwork for providing more efficient sex education. The research questions were posed as follows: First, what is the sexual awareness of middle school students? Second, what are the sexual behaviors of middle school students? Third, are their gender, school year and school type related to their sexual awareness and behaviors? The subjects in this study were 976 middle school students from Gyeonggi province. After a survey was conducted with questionnaires prepared by this researcher based on earlier studies to suit the purpose of the study, the collected data were analyzed with SPSS 10.0 program. The frequency analysis, x2 test and correlational analysis were implemented, and basic statistical data were obtained. The conclusions were as follows: First, regarding their sexual awareness, the largest group of them agreed that one must report in case of being raped(4.36), and the smallest number of them thought that one might have a sexual relationship with a person other than his or her spouse after marriage(1.56). Second, as for experience of indecent materials, part of sexual behaviors, 67.4 percent had ever contacted such materials. The most common medium through which they contacted them was the Internet(56.5%). The above-mentioned findings suggested that the sexual awareness of the middle school students wasn't influenced by gender or school type. But that varied with grade, as the third graders had the best sexual consciousness. Their sexual behaviors were different according to gender. The boy students contacted more indecent materials, and their experience of such materials varied with grade, since the third graders contacted the most obscene materials. And that also varied with school type, and the non-engineering students contacted more obscene materials. As for sexual drives, their masturbation experience was different according to gender, grade and school type. The number of the boys who practiced masturbation was four-fold larger than that of the girls, and the second graders had more such experience. By school type, the non-engineering students practiced more masturbation, but there was no significant gap between their kissing, caressing and dating experiences.