Methodological Considerations for Content Analysis of Sexual Consent Communication in Mainstream Films

Abstract

Young adults and college students who receive limited information about certain facets of sexuality, such as how to initiate sex and communicate consent, may turn to television and film for models. In fact, previous research suggests that young adults seek out media content such as television and film to obtain information about sexuality particularly in the absence of other sources of information. As such, it is important to understand the types of actions and behaviors modeled in mainstream media with regard to sexual activity. The overarching goal of the current study was to examine how sexual consent is depicted in mainstream film. However, we found there was limited information to guide the methodological design of such a study. Drawing on previous research, we developed a unique set of analytic procedures for conducting such a specific content analysis. The current article details our methodological approach including (1) how we developed our analytic procedures, (2) our rationale for developing these procedures, and (3) justification for deviating from previous procedures. This article concludes with a discussion regarding limitations of our study and lessons learned for conducting similar studies in the future.

Developing Valid and Feasible Measures of Sexual Consent for Experience Sampling Methodology

“…Regarding external sexual consent, feedback provided by pilot participants in their open-ended responses indicated that they struggled to distinguish the various constructs of consent communication. Corroborating this feedback, the strong correlations between verbal and explicit cues as well as between nonverbal and implicit cues suggest that participants may have conflated these types of consent communication in their event-level data – even though they are conceptually distinct categorization systems (Hickman & Muehlenhard, 1999 ; Jozkowski et al, 2016 ). To help clarify these distinctions in future studies, we recommend that researchers using the ESM measure of external sexual consent provide the operational definitions of straightforward, subtle, verbal, and nonverbal signals ( Table 1 ) to participants at the beginning of the study.…”

“…Jozkowski et al (2014) also developed an External Consent Scale. However, this measure does not directly map onto Hickman and Muehlenhard's (1999) conceptualization of external consent communication, which has been used in several recent studies (e.g., Jozkowski et al, 2016;Willis, Blunt-Vinti et al, 2019). Specifically, Jozkowski et al's (2014) items may be too specific to fully encompass the myriad ways people communicate consent.…”

“…Based on this conceptualization of external consent communication (Table 1), we drafted original items that asked participants about how they communicated their willingness to engage in sexual activity during their most recent partnered sexual activity. To write these items, we adopted language and phrases related to consent cues (i.e., explicit/ direct, implicit/indirect, verbal, nonverbal) that have been used in previous studies (Hickman & Muehlenhard, 1999;Jozkowski et al, 2016;Willis, Blunt-Vinti, et al, 2019). We then consulted dictionaries and thesauruses to determine other possible phrasings to provide participants; this process resulted in 20 total items.…”

Sexual Consent in Committed Relationships: A Dyadic Study

“…We coded the open-ended data regarding typical sexual consent communication by drawing on themes from previous research (e.g., Hickman & Muehlenhard, 1999 ; Jozkowski et al., 2016 ). To create the codebook for this question, the first and third authors independently read separate subsamples of the responses (∼25% in total) to identify salient statements that were relevant to the theme of sexual consent communication (Braun & Clarke, 2006 ).…”

Sexual health promotion messages for young people in Netflix most-watched series content (2015–2020): mixed-methods analysis study

“…It included: (1) description of the series and episodes, (2) identification of themes belonging to one of the two following groups ‘sexual health themes’ or ‘other health themes’ and (3) qualitative material for sexual health promotion composed of dialogue verbatims and scene descriptions. Our data collection and coding process is near to the methodology developed by Jozkowski et al 31 except that we focused on the episodes as a whole and our coding focused on sexual health promotion messages.…”