Sexual education with adolescents within a family context in the light of Freirean (anti)dialogicality

Abstract The aim of this study was to understand family conversations about sexuality from the perspective of adolescents. We conducted an exploratory-descriptive qualitative study anchored in Paulo Freire’s dialogical framework. The data were collected using an on-line questionnaire completed by 13 adolescents aged 14-19 years living in a municipality in the south of Brazil selected using snowball sampling. A lexicographic analysis was performed of the text corpus created from the questionnaire answers. Family discussions about sexuality were dialogical and anti-dialogical. Dialogicality was related to feelings of trust and affinity, above all with mothers, while anti-dialogicality was bound to prejudice and conservatism, which was more evident in fathers. The findings show that the context of family discussions about sexuality is influenced by affective, cultural, social, and religious aspects.