Adolescents' patterns of interpretation of sex education at school

• Applicant: Dr. Markus Hoffmann
• Subject Area: Educational Research on Socialization, Welfare and Professionalism
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 561237413

The objective of the planned qualitative research project is to record and analyse sociological patterns of interpretation of young people in the context of sexuality education at school. The study aims to identify and examine central reference problems in the interplay between school, youth and sexuality that are generated when young people talk about sexuality education at school. Based on this analysis, the central aim of the study is to identify and describe which forms of processing of these reference problems can be condensed into basic patterns of interpretation.The initial stage of the analysis focuses on interpretations that are explicitly related to the curriculum of school-based sex education. In this section, an analytical distinction is made between interpretations that refer to the official teaching process with the involvement of the teacher and those that can be analytically assigned to peer dynamics. The objective of this analytical distinction is to generate empirical findings on the specific requirements and processing of the subject of sexuality from the students' perspective, with a particular focus on peer dynamics and the involvement of teachers. The results of the study serve to differentiate the findings of the structural-theoretical professional approach, particularly the antinomic descriptions and the pluralisation paradox, as well as the discourse on values in (school) education.The second step of the analysis involves an examination of interpretations that describe schools and teaching as instances of sexual socialisation. The objective is to make a contribution to the resumption and further development of sexual socialisation models of schools. With regard to intersectional discourses, one objective of the project is to supplement queer-theoretical empirical research by including explicitly cis*identified adolescents in the survey alongside the interpretations of trans* and queer adolescents. From an international perspective, the objective is to implement the Anglo-American and Scandinavian discourse on critical masculinity (CSMM) in German-language youth-related school research.The objective of the interviews is to facilitate social transfer with cooperating schools and the city of Cologne. The initial qualitative-empirical findings aim to ascertain the extent and nature of school-relevant sexual references to populist and religious-fundamentalist social media content among young people. From a methodological research perspective, the study seeks to further differentiate the sociological interpretation pattern analysis method. In particular, it aims to identify and transfer the stages of abstraction carried out in the evaluation process into a more systematic approach, thereby sharpening them in comparison to related methods such as the documentary method.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants