A Qualitative Study of Adolescent Sexual Education and its Contextual Factors with Emphasis on Interpersonal Relations with Case study: High school adolescent girls and boys residing in Tehran

Sex education is adopting methods for creating healthy sexualcharacteristics and behaviors and at the same time removing inappropriatesexual characteristics and behaviors from human existence. In otherwords, sex education offers a series of essential psychological, physical,and religious information regarding the sexual field related to anindividual, as well as providing information and awareness to theindividual in order to become more familiar with the characteristics of theopposite sex. The present study aimed to investigate sex education ofadolescents in Tehran and its underlying factors with emphasis oninterpersonal relationships with parents. To this end, qualitative researchmethod and interviewing technique were used for data collection. Thegrounded theory approach was employed to analyze the data. Theobtained data resulted in forming categories such as awareness ofreligious issues related to sex education, parents’ awareness of sexualissues and its physical and psychological effects, parents’ appropriatebehaviors in family, parents’ awareness of and dominance on somecommunication skills for better connections with children, sex educationin the form of school education, parents’ education and socialization,correct transfer of sexual norms and guidelines to children, existence ofan emotional connection in family, supervision of school activities forchildren and adolescents, and cooperation with parents in this field. Theseconcepts were categorized into three themes: family, educational orextramarital and social factors. Finally, based on the results, one of themain reasons for influencing sexual education in this study is theawareness among families and at the top among parents.