Sexual self-esteem and sexual needs of young adults with cerebral palsy
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Date
2014-12-30
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Abstract
Sexuality is an important part of human existence, irre-spective of race, religion or level of physical fitness. It can, however, be treated and exhibited by individuals in very different ways. The place of sexuality in a person’s life, and in the way it is materialised, is determined by a number of biopsychosocial factors. For some, the presence of these factors and their influence is not a matter of choice. They may arise as a consequence of the psychophysical condi-tion of their organism. People with motor disabilities un-doubtedly belong to this group. The study was carried out in Poland on a group of 61 peo-ple with roughly equal proportions of men and women. Subject selection was non-random; every subject was di-agnosed with cerebral palsy (CP) and was aged between 15 and 25. All of the subjects had normal levels of intelli-gence. Two methods were used in the study: Sexual Self-es-teem Scale and Sexual Needs Scale. The results in terms of sexual self-esteem and sexual needs allowed two different subgroups of subjects to be distin-guished (H – with high scores; L – with low scores). The analysis of significance levels of the differences in terms of sexual self-esteem and sexual needs between subgroups H and L confirmed the clear distinction between each of the subgroups’ clinical pictures (p < .001) in 20 out of 21 of the analysed aspects. Falling in love was the only matter that did not differentiate the subgroups.conclusionsThere is a clear polarization of the results. Only 1/3 of the respondents had high sexual self-esteem and sexual needs. The remaining 2/3 reported having a rather low sexual self-esteem and low levels of needs with regards to their own sexuality. It needs to be stressed that CP-affected youth, similarly to their peers, may need support in discov-ering their sexuality and satisfying their sexual needs (2/3 of the respondents). The specifics of the range of support should take into account the aspects highlighted by the lit-erature as associated with the causes of disability and con-texts of psychosocial functioning of individuals with CP.
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cerebral palsy; disability; sexual behavior
Citation
"Health Psychology Report", 2014, 2(4), s. 1-9