ERIC Number: EJ1261151
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2020-Jul
Pages: 24
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0155-0640
EISSN: N/A
'Is This Normal?': Examining Sex Education in a Corpus of Magazine Advice Columns
Carr, Georgia
Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, v43 n2 p145-168 Jul 2020
To properly understand sex education, it is important to consider the informal education that takes place outside the classroom. Students often seek out other resources to supplement the education they receive in school, especially to cover topics which are absent or underdeveloped in the formal sex education curriculum. A key resource for this, especially among young women, is the magazine advice column. Advice columns create a direct interaction between the reader and the magazine and encourage the disclosure of intimate, confidential information, making them a ready medium for the production and consumption of sex education. This study uses the advice columns in "Dolly," a popular Australian magazine, to investigate adolescents' concerns about normality. This research is based on a corpus of 88,000 words, with data from advice columns published 20 years apart (mid-1990s and mid-2010s), which is analyzed using keywords and concordancing. This is a unique corpus study in that it considers similarity as well as difference in the data by investigating the recurring concern with normality that is evident in both decades of the corpus.
Descriptors: Sex Education, Periodicals, Information Seeking, Informal Education, Foreign Countries, Adolescent Attitudes, Discourse Analysis, Females, Interpersonal Relationship, Psychological Patterns, Physiology
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Australia
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A