'Our Lives' and 'Life Happens', from stigma to empathy in young people's depictions of sexual health and relationships

Abstract

This article describes qualitative research undertaken to explore young people’s understanding of sex and relationships that used a scenario-driven body-mapping technique. This art-based method was designed to allow young people to think deeply about the subject and build upon each other’s ideas through the medium of decorating a life-sized human body. Although this method produced rich information, KeywordS adolescence art-based research sexual health body mapping qualitative research 01_JAAH_9.1_Grozdanovski_9-23.indd 9 4/24/18 9:18 AM Kate Senior | Laura Grozdanovski | Richard Chenhall ... 10 Journal of Applied Arts & Health relationships stigma empathy the depictions of young people tended to be highly stigmatized. We further refined the method to encourage young people to empathize with the character that they created and the resultant research became the basis for the sexual health resource