Interview with Laura, 18-19, British, middle class, no religion. Women, Risk and AIDS Project, London, 1989. Anonymised version including field notes. (Ref: LJH35)

This interview is part of the Women, Risk and Aids Project (1989-90) archive which was created as part of the Reanimating Data Project (2018-20).Anonymised transcript of an interview with Laura, who has had some vocational training and is now doing her A-Levels. She is quite independent, having left home at sixteen, has had a liberal upbringing - she wonders how her parent's divorce when she was thirteen has impacted her attitude to life. Laura has had a couple of long term relationships and is still friends with both of those. She slept with her first boyfriend, mostly out of curiosity, after dating for three months - she says her first time was an unexpected experience and nothing like she had imagined. It took her awhile to enjoy sex, something that she discovered was fairly common among her female peers. Laura has been using condoms, but thinks that there should be more condom-use promotion aimed at young people. She also thinks that there is a social class and racial divide in understandings of AIDS and risk, and that boys she knows are more worried about unwanted pregnancies than AIDS transmission. Most of Laura's AIDS education was through TV and other media outlets. Formal sex education came from a Religious Education teacher at school, and was much too late for her and her peers. Laura would like to complete a degree in either women's studies or psychology, and would like children one day - she isn't too keen on the idea of marriage, though.