Abstract
To properly understand sex education, it is important to consider the informal education that takes place outside
the classroom. Students often seek out other resources to supplement the education they receive in school, especially to cover
topics which are absent or underdeveloped in the formal sex education curriculum. A key resource for this, especially among young
women, is the magazine advice column. Advice columns create a direct interaction between the reader and the magazine and encourage
the disclosure of intimate, confidential information, making them a ready medium for the production and consumption of sex
education. This study uses the advice columns in Dolly, a popular Australian magazine, to investigate
adolescents’ concerns about normality. This research is based on a corpus of 88,000 words, with data from advice columns published
20 years apart (mid-1990s and mid-2010s), which is analyzed using keywords and concordancing. This is a unique corpus study in
that it considers similarity as well as difference in the data by investigating the recurring concern with normality that is
evident in both decades of the corpus.
Research on Young Pioneer Counselor's Sex Education Curriculum Leadership
