Rachel Lambrecht submitted a research proposal to the University of Redlands in 2014. I attained this proposal through on of my professors. Lambrecht’s research question focused around the benefits and costs of including or not including social-emotional learning in sex education classrooms as reported by experts.

Lambrecht argues that current sex education is not effective and must be reformed, focusing specifically on how children interpret the information they are given in school into practices in their own lives. Her proposal explains the necessity of youth learning not only about prevention of sex and safe sex practices, but to see sexuality in a positive light, in contrast to how sex is normally portrayed in schools. There is a culture of fear around sex education that posits safe sex as mutually exclusive to sex for pleasure. Body positive language is rarely included. Lambrecht wants to research how social emotional learning can be included using the opinion’s of experts.  As Lambrecht’s proposal uses expert knowledge in order to understand an aspect of sex education, our projects are quite similar. Although, my focus is specific to California’s new sex education standards as of 2016.

Lambrecht proposes to do snowball sampling, first reaching out to experts within her own network, and then learning of others from her interviews. Her interviews used open-ended questions and would be categorized as qualitative research. As she is interviewing, Lambrecht would need to attain the Institutional Review Boards Approval of the topic, however, the risks are minimal. Her research does not work with any vulnerable populations, and as she planned to only interview experts in their own field, there is very little chance even for job retaliation. This part of the research differs from my own, as although I am also interviewing experts, my research does have a slight risk of job retaliation, and so I must set up further precautions to protect my participants.

Lambrecht’s proposal is very similar to how I would imagine my own proposal, however, less complicated. Her project seems simpler and her question addressing a broader issue. My research question is very specific to California and I am looking for multiple data types. I am involved with vulnerable populations, although not interviewing them. Thus, my proposal would be different in many aspects.