Sexual Autobiographies from St. Petersburg 1996

This qualitative dataset contains love biographies written by citizens of Saint Petersburg (Russia), received through a biography writing competition conducted by the research project "Mosaic life. Upbringing, gender and sexuality in Finland, the Baltic countries and St. Petersburg". The St. Petersburg writing competion was titled "Sex, love and sexuality in your life", and was conducted by the University of Helsinki (Finland) together with the Institute of Sociology in St. Petersburg. The competition announcement was published in the newspapers "Vechernii Peterburg" and "Chas Pik" and, in addition, leaflets were dsitributed in various academic institutions and women's organizations in the area. In the announcement, the researchers specified what kind of issues they were interested in, and instructed participants to write authentically and honestly about their life, as if they were writing to a close friend. The dataset consists of 43 biographies translated from Russian into Finnish. Similar competitions were held in Finland and Estonia (see FSD2545). The biographies describe people's concepts of love, family life, childhood and adulthood, whether sex was talked about at home and school, sexual experiences over the lifetime, importance of sex in the participants' lives, factors influencing their love and sexual life, marriages and other love relationships, experiences of loneliness, combining love and work, and unusual subcultures. The writing instructions also included a couple of questions related to pornography and prostitution. The dataset is only available in Finnish.