BIO

My name is Emma Quaid, and I am a second-year student at FSU. I have majored in sociology, and after I finish my bachelor’s degree, I plan to continue with graduate school and get a Ph.D. and aim to have a career in academia. This project is the first research project I have participated in, but I hope to continue to do more, and I would be interested in doing more research projects in the field of sociology.

Analyzing Consent Cross-Culturally: Building a Framework to Accommodate Social Understanding

Abstract

Consent has been a topic of recent philosophical debate, and understanding how consent is given and what that agreement looks like is important to philosophy debates and everyday life application. The concept of consent presents itself in the agreements we make, like consent to medical procedures, consent to loan agreements, or consent to sexual acts. Knowing the markers of valid consent is crucial to having fair and morally permissible agreements. While consent may be seen as a basic yes or no, factors such as cultural expectations, implied and explicit communication, gender roles, social scripts and expectations can make consent harder to categorize and understand. The objective of our research is to look at how consent presents itself across different cultures considering the three prominent fields of sexual, medical, and contractual consent. We want to form a base framework or understanding of consent so individuals can navigate what consensual agreement looks like cross-culturally. This includes what valid consent looks like and what’s actually being agreed to. By collecting journal articles through FSU databases, we performed literature reviews to build concept maps and knowledge of the current consent terrain. After the summary and analysis of the articles, a preliminary visual was created off the most compelling consent framework with cross-cultural additions to account for our analysis. We found that consent relies on the interaction between the content of one’s agreement and the implied exchange that comes with that agreement, primarily through situational and cultural knowledge and expectations.

Keywords: Consent, Knowledge, Expectations