Risky Lessons: Sex Education And Social Inequality By Jessica Field

In this course, we discussed many of the underlying questions in research: what is truth, and can it be attained? Can research ever be truly objective? How do our underlying biases shape our research, and how do we deal with this? The majority of these questions lack a definitive answer, as do most research topics, but by discussing somewhat philosophical inquiries weekly, I feel as though I gained a new perspective on my future career in mathematics, particularly statistics. As someone who enjoys collecting and analyzing data, these questions have always been in the back of my mind; however, I enjoyed gaining a new perspective on these inquiries this semester through the lens of sexuality and sexual education, topics that I am also passionate

The fact that information could be gathered and analyzed in such different approaches yet have similar initial questions really caused me to consider how my career in statistics would produce knowledge. For example, in Jessica Field's "Introduction" and "Methodological Appendix" in Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality, Field's collected her research on sexual education courses by participating in three different North Carolinian schools' curriculums, conducting interviews, and forming relationships with the students and teachers. She spoke very personally about these experiences, citing her own perspectives and opinions during the classes. For example, because of the conservative framework in most of these courses, she did not feel comfortable revealing her lesbian identity and in turn heard many homophobic remarks from the instructors, frightening and disheartening her. However, she did reveal her identity to the teacher at the more liberal Quaker school; though I do not think this affected her results too greatly, I would consider this a bias in her research, since treating one group differently than the others for a quality not being researched can skew the results. Unlike some of the other articles with qualitative research, she did not include quotes from interviews, but rather summarized what she found from these conversations. However, as we did only read the introduction and appendix, these could be found within the rest of her book. Essentially, her findings from this experience were that sexual education has a definite effect on a student's outlook on society, as it presents class, gender, race, sexual orientation, and religion in a very specific way during an adolescent's formative years, and the abstinence only perspective can skew these viewpoints greatly