Our research question: To what extent does lad culture and binge drinking affect the female student experience of sexual harassment?
Team:
Myself
Liam May
Steph Storey
Overall I am really happy with the topic our group decided to choose and I am glad that our research proposal was approved. Sexual harassment on campus is an issue close to my heart and it is a problem I have spent a lot of time campaigning on with our SU Women’s representative and the feminists society. Lad culture also is a hot topic especially around NUS politics and there is talk of an article being released soon about Lad Culture on campus, which is really exciting and will be a very useful source for our research. Our society also has actively been campaigning against lad culture, which first started by boycotting our SU’s affiliation with a misogynist promo company called Your Best Deal (YBD). This also lead to us passing a motion at NUS women’s conference, which encouraged all university’s student unions to assess any promo company’s attitudes towards women before having an affiliation with them. So, from a student politics point of view I am fairly experienced in this area and I seem to be taking the role of the leader in this group project. Also my sociological interest in feminist theory I have been able to suggest journals and books that can be used to base our theory in.
I would like to see this group project to also act as a policy recommendation to our student union. I firmly believe that sociology and the discipline of social policy can have a positive relationship with each other and change the world we live in; I ultimately believe that this is the purpose of sociology itself.
In terms of research we will definitely take the qualitative approach. I have always deemed this approach to be more valuable as statistics can be unreliable and constrained by many factors, but data from interviews etc give us rich, detailed information on how individuals are affected by society on a personal level. I would like us to try doing a media content analysis to assess how the phenomenon’s of sexual harassment, lad culture and binge drinking affect our university community and our country’s culture at large. Although this is not quantitative data it will give us a basic idea of how these themes work separately and together on a bigger scale. Our most important research method will be conducting a focus group. Unfortunately due to the ethical guidelines we have been given we are ultimately restricted in which participants we can use, which is a huge shame considering what could be possible if we were allowed to branch out and take participants from all over UCLan. I am really looking forward to what we find out, and structuring this piece of research!
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