The LGBT health-research group IMPACT is currently running the first survey of gay and same-sex-attracted adolescent boys and their parents.
Dr. Michael E. Newcomb, research assistant professor at Northwestern University and a staff member of IMPACT, is leading the study. When asked what makes this study so new, Newcomb told Windy City Times "there's been a number of studies in the past that have found that, when LGBT young people have good support from their families and their parents, then they have much better health outcomes in the long term. ... But all of those studies have only asked questions of the adolescent or the LGBT young person themselves and have not then followed up with the parents to get their perspective on their relationship with their child. And we know that sometimes there are differences in opinion between an adolescent and their parent about their relationship and those differences can have an impact on health of young people."
Newcomb said "I think that one of the reasons [there is a lack of research with parents of LGBT youth] is because historically parents ... aren't always accepting of their LGBT young people. So it can be very challenging to enroll them in a study." However, he added, "There's been a lot of social change that has been occurring over the last decade or so and it's become more and more feasible for us to start involving parents in research with young people. By conducting research on this right now, as the years go by, more and more people will continue to come out to their parents at younger ages so that we can really hit the ground running with this type of work."
But this study also adds another new insight to the existing research. Newcomb said, "We don't really know anything about the specific aspects of parent child relationships that have an impact on LGBT youth health. We're really looking at lots of different aspects of the parent-child relationship—things like emotional support, how effective the communication is between the parent and child [and] parental monitoring, which means how aware the parent is of the different things the adolescent is doing in their free time. So who they're hanging out with, where they're going, what types of places they're going to..."
This particular study will also measure the effect that these aspects of a parent-adolescent relationship have on self-esteem and depression. Newcomb said "in addition to mental health and self esteem, we also want to look at alcohol and drug use and sexual behavior so that we can see how parent child relationships might influence those things as well."
In this study, Newcomb expects to find the same patterns that have emerged in other studies. That is, "when both the young person and the parent are indicating that there's high levels of support and high quality relationship between the parent and the child that symptoms of depression will be lower, self esteem will be higher."
However, IMPACT will not stop there. Said Newcomb: "Ultimately, what we want to do is we want to take this information and develop programs for parents of LGBT youth to help them communicate with their children about health matters. [Those include] mental health, being bullied at school, substance use [and] sexual behavior."
When asked what these programs might look like, Newcomb told Windy City Times, "We're really in a formative phase right now. There's been a lot of research with heterosexual adolescents that they will invite a child and a parent to kind of a group-based HIV-prevention program where they're getting information about HIV prevention together. They're also teaching good communication skills so that the parent and child can talk more effectively about sexual health.
"In the future, I think we're going to see that more and more of these types of programs are being conducted online because we're going to want more and more people to be able to access these programs."
At the moment, IMPACT is just collecting data, but Newcomb said he hopes to look into some of the results later in 2014 or in 2015. All of IMPACT's finished research is summarized online at www.impactprogram.org . The survey itself is a short ten-minute questionnaire conducted entirely online. An eligibility screening is available at https://www.lgbtstudy.org/limesurvey/index.php?sid=15138〈=en.
