Exploring early adolescents’ perceptions of sexual consent: A mixed methods analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sexual consent is a fundamental component of healthy sexual exploration. Despite the perceived importance of consent in preventing sexual violence, it remains an understudied topic among the adolescent population, and early adolescents (ages 10 to 14) in particular. Given that early adolescence is when many people begin forming intimate relationships and exploring their sexual identities, it is critical to understand how they perceive sexual consent and communication processes to effectively inform the sex education and violence prevention programs that they receive. This exploratory, mixed-methods research examines how this age group conceptualizes sexual consent, as well as the dominant influences and discourses that shape their understanding. This three-paper dissertation addresses the following research questions: Paper 1: What beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours do early adolescents hold regarding sexual consent? What factors are associated with endorsement of sexual consent values among early adolescents? Paper 2: What are the dominant sexual consent discourses depicted in popular media? Paper 3: How is sexual consent defined and conceptualized by early adolescents? What sources and influences have informed early adolescents’ conceptualizations of sexual consent, and in what ways? Paper 1 is a cross-sectional analysis using pre-test data from a larger program evaluation study. This paper examines the sexual consent beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours of 254 middle school students from a large, urban city in Ontario, Canada. Bivariate and multiple regression analyses revealed that greater perceived negative sanctions of dating violence and higher endorsement of gender stereotypes predicted the endorsement of positive consent values. Gender was also a significant correlate, with girls more likely than boys to endorse positive sexual consent values. Paper 2 is a qualitative analysis of popular song lyrics from the 2023 Billboard Year-End Hot 100 chart. A subsample of songs (n=65) containing references to sexual behaviours or intimate relationships were analyzed thematically to understand the dominant discourses of sexual consent represented in popular music. The findings show gendered portrayals of sexual scripts and norms. Men were predominantly characterized as active—and at times, aggressive—initiators of sexual activity, while women were depicted in more passive roles by accommodating men’s sexual desires. In addition, some female artists’ lyrics demonstrated empowerment and agency, albeit often within frameworks that reinforced patriarchal norms and objectification. Paper 3 is a constructivist grounded theory study to develop a theoretical explanation for early adolescents’ process of defining and conceptualizing sexual consent communication. Fifteen semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with early adolescents between the ages of 11 and 14. The results highlight a dual perspective among participants: consent as a straightforward verbal process and consent as a complex, context-sensitive phenomenon conditioned by relational and societal factors. Participants often adopted oversimplified and binary understandings of consent influenced by broader cultural discourses alongside their awareness of pressures, constraints, and non-verbal communication strategies. Taken together, these findings have significant implications for sexual violence prevention and consent education. Current programs fall short in aligning their content with adolescents’ lived realities, leading to irrelevant and ineffective instruction. This study highlights the importance of addressing gender norms, sexual scripts, relational fears and pressures, and prevailing consent discourses, offering valuable guidance for sexual violence education, prevention, and intervention.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".