Bilingual Minority Adolescents

In general high school tends to be a place where a lot of change happens for people. They are figuring out who they are and how they fit into the rest of the world. One of the bigger realizations that can happen in high school is “coming out” or just realizing that aspect of yourself. This can be very difficult for people whose sexual orientation is anything but hetero. It can also be harder on those are not only part of LGBTQ+ but also are a racial minority. This study set out to uncover what impact being a sexual minority youth has on social interactions between peers, specifically if homophily plays a part in this integration. Homophily in the module as when “adolescents who are similar to one another choose to spend time together” (Leach, …show more content…
First they began with a sample of 132 schools across the United States, Add Health then gave all students an survey in school to establish a basis for the “In-Home Interview” which would be conducted later. This took place in 1994 and 1995, then they did it again the following year and then again 6 and 11 years following that. They divided they spans of time into “Waves I, II, III and IV”. They used the information gathered from Waves III and IV for the information on same-sex attraction between peers to create a quota for their experiment. Their experiment used two of the largest “saturated” Midwest high schools as designated by Add Health. Also “saturated” according to the article (2015) was defined as when “all students in the school participated in the In-Home Interviews” so these schools were not considered random for the experiment and had a solid base to gather information from (p.967). The first school Jefferson, had 1,704 students where the majority of the population was composed of minority students. The school Sunshine, had 829 students had a predominantly Caucasian population with about only about 7 percent of the school being composed of minorities. Lack of peer nominations or drop outs were controlled with the composition change method, so that all participants were included in the analysis and allowed to join or leave the experiment at any …show more content…
By seeking out the underlying causes and trying to understand how sexual orientation factors into social development and acceptance is very important for a multitude of reasons. I would be interested to see how much it would change again in the next 15 years, seeing as the American society is becoming more accepting of those who are part of a the LGBTQ+ community. This experiment though it was very interesting could be improved by having a larger scale of students involved and with different locations. This experiment I think could have been executed in a more concise way than it was which would have helped make their results more cohesive than they appear to me. I think that also it would be important to have more decisive reasoning behind why students who identified as being in a sexual minority were unconsidered to be less likable. For future research it would be interesting to see if that trend changes over time. I find it really interesting that in the more ethnically diverse school there was less stigmatization with socialization than at the other school and I would like more concrete answers for why this is. As this country continues to grow being more aware of the differences between people is important so that we as people can learn to accept and respect one another and hopefully by studying this area it will help us to become