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Coming Out, Coming Home: Helping Families Adjust to a Gay or Lesbian Child Page 249 (271 of 304)
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Appendix 249
percent reported that religion was important or very important in their lives.
Families came from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and had house-
hold incomes ranging from over $1,200 to over $200,000 per year.
For the most part, the parents were fairly adjusted to their children’s sexual
orientation by the time of the interviews, so it is important to recognize the
external validity limitations of the sample. Because an unknown proportion
of the population of lesbian and gay youth do not publicly identify them-
selves, investigators in this area lack sufficient information to determine and
derive a truly representative sample. Nevertheless, it is important to recog-
nize that the goal of this study was not necessarily to discover findings that
could generalize to the larger population, but to develop data-based theory
about family adjustment that would be useful to practitioners.
This research was approved for human subjects by the Rutgers University
Office of Research and Sponsored Programs, Institutional Review Board, in
March of2003.
Data Collection
A combination of grounded theory (Glaser1978,1992) and narrative meth-
ods (Lincoln and Guba1985) were used to collect the data. Interviewers were
carefully trained to capture the respondents’ true voices and to avoid influ-
encing their interviewees’ responses. They were also trained to be vigilant
for social desirability effects. The interviewers (myself included) continually
reassured respondents that we wanted participants to be truthful and that
they would not be negatively judged for any of their responses, no matter
how harsh. Parents and their children were interviewed separately because it
was believed that individual respondents might edit their responses in front
of family members. Interviews were done mostly in person, but occasionally
an interview was done over the telephone if a child or parent lived out of
town or was away at school.
Below are the primary research questions, followed by some of the inter-
view questions:
1. How do parents react upon discovery that a son or daughter is gay or lesbian,
and what factors are related to changes in their reactions?
Parents were asked to describe parent-child relationships historically and
immediately prior to the discovery. They were asked how they learned of
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