Dating and Sexuality among Minority Adolescents with Disabilities: An Application of Sociocultural Theory

Abstract

Adolescents with disabilities, American Indians, Hispanics, and African Americans are more likely to experience victimization and pregnancy as teens. This study explored ethnic and racial minority youth with disabilities' dating and sexual experiences from the perspectives of social workers using Vygotsky's sociocultural theory. Thirteen in-depth interviews were conducted with master's degreeholding high school social work practitioners. Social workers described family beliefs and practices, socioeconomic status, special education, historical influences, and resiliency as aspects of adolescents' lives that impacted their dating and sexuality. Social workers' dialogue concerning family beliefs and attitudes toward abusive relationships were interpreted as internally oriented signs used by adolescents with disabilities to navigate their dating and sexuality. Socioeconomic status, family practices, and special education were interpreted as externally oriented meditational tools. Social workers reported that many adolescents experienced a history of violence, but that some adolescents adapted their cultural heritage by creating new values for themselves and engaged in healthier dating and sexual behaviors than their peers. Finally, although social workers were a source of support to adolescents with disabilities, they were also at times a portal for ethnocentric discourse.

Youth Perspectives of Healthcare in Central Mexico: An Application of Massey’s Critical Health Literacy Framework

“…As is common in qualitative research (see Crabtree & Miller [ 37 ]; Padgett [ 38 ]), we were sensitized through our preliminary coding process to the overlap between initial themes and those outlined by Massey et al’s [ 29 ] framework for studying adolescent HL (e.g., our theme pertaining to “barriers to positive relationships with doctors” with theirs of “patient–provider relationships”), and thus moved from an inductive to a deductive codebook in order to assess fit of our data with this useful framework and to outline findings in a salient context to healthcare literature. (For an example of this inductive to deductive template approach, see Linton & Rueda [ 39 ].) The fit of our preliminary codebook to Massey et al’s framework was excellent to the extent that only the titles and order of themes were changed.…”

Stratified reproduction and ableism: Women with disabilities and navigating reproduction and social control in Poland

“…The existing literature confirms that sexuality and reproduction of women with disabilities are silenced, and largely determined by pejorative attitudes towards sexuality and parenthood (Bahner, 2020; Frohmader and Meekosha, 2012; Peta, 2017). Women with disabilities often have limited opportunities to contact people with whom they can talk about sexuality: teachers, peers or family, and they are not seen as needing information about intimate life (Linton and Rueda, 2015). Attention should be paid to the situation of people living in institutions or experiencing overprotection at home, whose access to CSE may be even more limited.…”