Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Dimensions of Desire

1999; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1471-6402.1999.tb00338.x

1471-6402

Deborah L. Tolman, Laura A. Szalacha,

Child Abuse and Trauma

This study provides an example of how feminist psychology can bridge qualitative and quantitative methods while keeping lived experience at the center of an inquiry. The goal of the study was to begin to understand adolescent girls' experiences of sexual desire. We describe three separate and synergistically related analyses of interviews with 30 adolescent girls. We begin with a qualitative analysis of their voiced experiences of sexual desire; follow with a quantitative analysis of the differences in how urban and suburban girls describe these experiences, assessing the role of reported sexual violation; and conclude with a second qualitative analysis exploring the interaction between social location and reported sexual violation. These three analyses enabled us to understand qualitatively and to quantify interrelated dimensions of desire as described by adolescent girls.