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Coming Out, Coming Home: Helping Families Adjust to a Gay or Lesbian Child resources

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252  Appendix different region of the country. For example, if families from an area known as the Bible Belt were interviewed, religious conflicts might have played a more central role in family reactions. Thus a similar study that includes a siz- able sample from more religious and traditionally conservative areas of the U.S. could prove illuminating. Last, this study was cross-sectional and asked for retrospective recall, mean- ing that all respondents were interviewed at one point in time about incidents that occurred in the past. Such reports can be biased, whereby the way in which respondents remember events can differ from what actually occurred. Throughout this book, I discuss how such a bias could affect respondent reports. A longitudinal study of this topic, in which parents and children are interviewed close to the time the child comes out and then at various points in time afterward, could further test the family stage model identified in this study and determine necessary modifications. Despite these limitations, the findings of this study provide additional insight into an important but understudied area of research. Hopefully, human service professionals will find these results useful in their work with this potentially vulnerable population of families. 08_lasala14382_app.indd 252 3/10/10 1:12:11 PM

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