after conducting and transcribing the interviews, I coded the participants' responses according to the type of account they used when describing how they felt about dating an older boyfriend . These categories were further broken down into the sub-headings described below. For those participants who viewed the act as deviant-those who used excuses- I further coded their responses according to the type of explanation they gave for defining the act as deviant, looking for similarities and differences in answers to the question of what made these relationships deviant. In addition to scanning for types of accounts, I also looked for themes regarding participant's attitudes toward statutory rape laws and relevant characteristics of their relationships.