Lesbian Family Interview Essay

In the article The National Lesbian Family Study: 4. Interviews With the 10-Year-Old Children by Gartrell et al., they sought out to collect data on the 10 year old children’s psychosocial development and provide information for health care, and family services professionals, as well as education and public policies in relation to lesbian families. These children are a part of the National Lesbian Family study, a longitudinal study of lesbian families residing in the United States. Three previous interviews were conducted in the past with the families participating in this interview. To conduct this study, experimenters did phone interviews with the remaining 74 families in the initial study. The children and mothers were both given questionnaires, but in contrast, the mothers were also given a Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) to complete. The questions for the children evaluated their experiences with a lesbian family. The questions for the mothers evaluated the mothers experience raising the child. The findings of this study showed that the children living in lesbian households were more tolerant, accepting of diversity, and …show more content…
The researchers did well with making the experimental design longitudinal. Through this, the researcher is better able to see the changes the families go through over time. A longitudinal design is also appropriate for the topic of family life and development with children. Another strength was the diversity among the lesbian mothers. The researchers sampled mothers who smoked, who did not smoke, who varied in religious affiliation, ethnicity, and age. This helped make the results more generalizable to different lesbian mothers. Lastly, the researchers did right by the length of the questionnaires given to the families, with the children’s questionnaire being 10 questions long, and the mothers being longer and more extensive. Through all of the article’s strengths, it also has its