Sex Minority And Sexual Minority Orientation - 1156 Words

The Williams, Connolly, Pepler, and Craig (2005) study focuses on issues they feel are specific to sexual minority (lesbian, gay, and bisexual) adolescents and those that are questioning their sexuality. Williams et al. questions the way sexual orientation, victimization, psychosocial adjustment, and social support are intertwined in relation to sexual minority youth. They hypothesized that the absence of social support, from both family and friends, along with the experiences relating to being a victim, bring about a sexual minority orientation in adolescents. Additionally, Williams et al. sought to prove that victimizing experiences of sexual minority adolescents mediated the connection between psychological adjustment and social†¦show more content†¦The Williams et al. (2005) study was conducted on students from five high schools in a large south central Canadian city. There were 194 participants in total, of those half of them identified as sexual minority and questionin g adolescents, while the other half were heterosexual. The student’s ages ranged from 14 to 19, with a majority of them being of Euro-Canadian decent with two parent households. This study focused on psychosocial adjustment and social support as their main topics with various subtopics. Psychosocial adjustment included depression, externalizing symptoms, and victimization. More specifically, victimization encompassed bullying, sexual harassment and physical abuse. Lastly, for the social support aspect Williams et al. focused on the adolescent’s relationship with their mother and best friends along with their overall friendships. To conduct their research Williams et al. (2005) used well-known surveys where the students had to rate their responses on a numbered scale. In order to assess the symptoms of depression in the students, Williams et al. used the Beck Depression inventory and they used the Youth Self-Report to assess externalizing symptoms. After giving a very s pecific definition of bullying, students answered how frequently they had been bullied within the past two months. Williams et al. pulled items from the American