Researching sex and love relationships: The desing of an open questionnaire

Abstract

Sex and relationships education is, and has been, the great absent in Spanishboth school curriculum and the sociological research on it. Some relevant theoreticaland methodological developments have been needed for the construction ofthe research topic, in order to produce sociological knowledge within this field.This paper continues with this methodological task. It describes the process ofdesign of an evaluation questionnaire to portray the initial state of the issue. Inturn, it enables the research on sex and love relationships. In so doing, the paperoffers a useful well-founded tool to produce sociological knowledge on thisresearch topic, emerging in Spain. In this process of design, the paper sets a dialoguebetween a double process of categorisation: on the one hand, the themesinvolved in the revised literature on the topic; on the other hand, the themes offeredby the adolescent voices of the subjects participants in the research. Alongthe paper, some key debates in contemporary social theory are addressed, suchas the appeal to action research, education for democratic citizenship and humanrights, the visibilisation of minors’ agency and voices, the use of participatoryand critical evaluation, and the reflection on power as inherent to social relations.