Where Educational Technology and Sexology Meet
The SHaG lab also conducts research in the general areas of education and sexuality. These two areas come together because Dr. Numer often teaches the human sexuality at Dalhousie. He has held numerous small grants in education and published four peer-reviewed articles on education technology. In addition, the team has been investigating how to leverage educational technology to conduct research on undergraduate students in an ethical manner. In our first SSHRC Insight Development grant, we sought to investigate undergraduate university students’ attitudes, beliefs, values and practices related to sexual orientation and sexual consent. Our intent was to bring together educational technology and sexology to conduct an innovative mixed methods research that can capture a diverse data set related to sex and sexuality. We successfully collected data in these two areas. We have four peer-reviewed articles from this research either published or under review. The findings explore how demographics such as race, class, immigration status, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, and degree major relate to one’s attitudes, values, beliefs and practices. We also examined how social norms and cultural trends effect these specific areas of sexuality and how these change over time.
Related Publications
Joy, P., Crawford, Z., Sinno, J., Walters, J., & Numer, M. (2021). A poststructural discourse analysis of the attitudes, beliefs, and values of undergraduate Canadian university students regarding sexual orientation. The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality. https://www.utpjournals.press/eprint/YJIH3M8IAHRARPX9U96P/full
Matchett, B., Numer, M. (2021). Optional or Obligatory? Exploring Undergraduate University Students’ Attitudes, Opinions, and Beliefs of Verbal Sexual Consent. Healthy Populations Journal. https://ojs.library.dal.ca/hpj/article/view/10658/10005
Spencer, R., Sinno, J., Hatfield, K., Biderman, M., Doria, N., & Numer, M. (2020). Exploring Top Hat’s impact on undergraduate students' belongingness, engagement, and self-confidence: A mixed methods study. Journal of Research on Technology in Education. DOI: 10.1177/160940690600500107