Sexual Objectification in the Lives of Girls: What Girls (Want to) Know

Methods

Summary

Participatory Action Research (PAR) is an approach to research in which researchers work with community members to do research that matters to them—we conduct research with participants, not on them. Our project has two goals.  The first is the research goal:  1) to understand what sexualization—being treated like a sexual object rather than a full person—is like for diverse girls (Latina, African-American, lesbian/bisexual/queer, immigrants) and 2) to determine a strategy that they lead to combat it together with others in their community.  The second is a learning goal: 2) for adolescent girls to learn about research, how to conduct it, and how they can use research to be of use in their own lives.

This will be a Rapid PAR project where we will work with 8 adolescent girls as co-researchers over a period of 10 weeks.  Here is the Timeline:

Week 1: We will introduce each other, discuss how sexualization affects each of us, and begin to determine a possible research question for the project. Possible research questions include, "How do diverse adolescent girls navigate sexualization in school?," "How do diverse adolescent girls engage with sexualization in the media?," or "How does street harassment impact diverse adolescent girls' sense of safety and agency?" 

Week 2-3: We will develop a research question and then determine the best method and sample to study our question (i.e. survey, interviews, focus groups, PhotoVoice).

Week 4-5: We will collect data from at least fifty participants and learn about possible methods of data analysis.

Week 6-8: We will analyze the data as a team (i.e. statistical methods for a survey or qualitative analysis of interview data).

Week 9-10: We will decide with whom to share our findings and for what audiences., such as co-researcher’s school, peers, parents) and then how we want to do it (creating a video, art installation, traditional research report, White Paper, and/or conference presentation).  We will put together one form of dissemination and a plan for ensuring that it gets to the intended audience.  The findings will also be shared on this page with our donors.