Methodological mishaps and slippery subjects: Stories of first sex, oral sex, and sexual trauma in qualitative sex research.

Abstract

Numerous assumptions-many rooted in privilege, educational status, and hegemonic power norms-are embedded in the process of collecting qualitative research on people's sexualities, particularly surrounding meaning making, language, and sexual scripts. This paper interrogates 3 moments in qualitative sex research-what I call "margins of the interview"-where the researcher and participants' meaning making around women's sexuality diverged, raising complicated questions around coconstruction of sexual subjectivity in the research setting. Drawing from interview data with a diverse community sample of 20 women (interviewed in 2014, diverse age, race, class, and sexual identities) in a large southwestern metropolitan city, I outline in detail 3 places of methodological ambiguity (or "marginalia") in the interviews. First, I examine how questions about "first sex" evoke complicated webs of stories that center on early sexual traumas, nonpenetrative sexual experiences, and virginity loss. Further, asking about women's "experiences with oral sex" reveals how women construct themselves as performing sexual labor via giving rather than receiving oral sex, while asking about women's worst sexual experiences either highlighted, or erased, sexual violence. Implications for the impact of how sex researchers-wedged between paradigms-choose to word questions, along with how women push and rewrite typical sexual scripts in qualitative research, are discussed. Ultimately, the slippage between the assumed and the experienced also moves us away from thinking about qualitative research in terms of validity and instead highlights the positive, puzzling, and difficult aspects of the "marginalia" instead.

Female College Students Perceptions of Virginity and Oral Sex

“…Findings suggest that because young women believe that oral sex is not the same as vaginal sex, virginity is preserved. Consistent with existing research, some of the young women in this study viewed participation in oral sex as a way to stay "pure" and maintain one's status as a virgin, because there is no vaginal penetration (Bersamin, Fisher, Walker, Hill, & Grube, 2007;Byers, Henderson, & Hobson, 2009;Esbaugh & Gute, 2008;Fahs, 2016;Hans & Kimberly, 2011). Only two of the participants differed on their opinions of virginity with oral sex and believed that if you engage in oral sex, you are no longer a virgin.…”

Toward better measurement: The role of survey marginalia in critical sexuality research.

“…Studies that enable researchers’ assumptions, definitions, and beliefs to be interrupted are critical to developing psychological insights that do not merely replicate, but test, wonder, question, and remain curious about the psychology of individuals and groups (Teo, 2015). Other critical measurement strategies include using self-anchored items that examine how participants define the anchors of Likert scales (McClelland, 2011; Cantril & Fried, 1944), card sorting techniques that explore the taxonomies people use to group items they see as related (McClelland, 2014), participatory methods that include participant input in every stage of research design (Stoudt, 2016), and analyses of misunderstandings that occur throughout interviews (Fahs, 2016).…”

Conversations on the margins: Using data entry to explore the qualitative potential of survey marginalia.

“…Qualitative researchers have recognized that transcribing interview and focus group recordings are not neutral representations of speech and conversation. Their production involves choices: judgments about details to include, guesses of unclear utterances imposed, interpretations of subtle meanings made (Fahs, 2016). Qualitative researchers have also recognized benefits of beginning analysis as they transcribe their interviews and focus groups.…”