The Politicization of Gay Youth Health: Response to Li, Katz-Wise, and Calzo (2014)

Citation

Savin-williams, Ritch C. & Joyner, Kara (2014). The Politicization of Gay Youth Health: Response to Li, Katz-Wise, and Calzo (2014). Archives of Sexual Behavior. vol. 43 (6) pp. 1027-1030

Abstract

The purpose of our original essay (Savin-Williams & Joyner, 2014) was to caution researchers against accepting Add Health’s Wave 1 adolescents who reported romantic attraction exclusively to the same-sex or to both sexes as if they were, in reality, gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Based on previous large-scale research using self-administered surveys with youth, we argued that these apparent sexual minority youth were, to a large extent, adolescents who did not understand the meaning of the term romantic attraction or were adolescent pranksters. Two telling signs were the exceptionally and unexpectedly large number of seemingly gay/bisexual youth in the dataset and their identification as heterosexual in future waves of data collection. A previous explanation offered by Russell and Seif (2010) to account for these discrepancies, which we dismissed as highly unlikely given previous developmental research, was endorsed by Li, Katz-Wise, and Calzo (2014): Gay, lesbian, and bisexual adolescents

URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007%2Fs10508-014-0359-2

Keyword(s)

Medical Sciences

Reference Type

Journal Article

Journal Title

Archives of Sexual Behavior

Author(s)

Savin-williams, Ritch C.
Joyner, Kara

Year Published

2014

Volume Number

43

Issue Number

6

Pages

1027-1030

DOI

10.1007/s10508-014-0359-2

Reference ID

5150