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ABSTRACT
Sexual minority youth are more likely to run away from home or experience homelessness, leaving them at increased risk of victimization and negative health outcomes. In this study, the authors use a developmental perspective that considers both vulnerable beginnings in families and the risky trajectories that follow to explore the connections between running away or being thrown out by parents and sexual minority women's and men's health in adulthood. Using four waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), the authors consider multiple dimensions of health and several potential intervening mechanisms. Findings suggest that runaway and thrownaway experiences have persistent negative effects on health into adulthood, in part because of their association with sexual victimization, educational attainment, and relationships with parents. Sexual minority men who have been thrown out by parents report a greater likelihood of suicidal ideation, smoking, and substance use into adulthood. Sexual minority women with runaway experiences have poorer health and increased depressive symptoms, while women with thrownaway experiences engage in more health risk behaviors. Sexual victimization stands out as a key mechanism for sexual minority women's health, as more than half of these young women report experiences of sexual victimization.
Acknowledgments
This research was funded in part by a grant from Wichita State University. The research is based on data from the Add Health project, a program project designed by J. Richard Udry (principal investigator) and Peter Bearman, and funded by grant P01 HD31921 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis. Opinions reflect those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the granting agencies.
Notes on contributors
Jennifer Pearson is an associate professor of Sociology at Wichita State University. Her research explores how the most salient contexts during adolescence, families and schools, shape adolescent development and well-being, and her work is driven by an interest in how inequalities by gender and sexuality are reproduced within these contexts.
Lisa Thrane is an associate professor in sociology at Wichita State University. Her research interests include young adult health, adolescent risk and resilience, and at-risk populations.
Lindsey Wilkinson is in the sociology department at Portland State University. His research focuses on gender and sexual minorities and how schools and communities shape the outcomes of youth and young adults.
Notes
1. While both groups are away from home at least overnight, thrownaways are told to leave by a caretaker while runaways leave without parental permission (Thompson, Safyer, & Pollio, 2001). Youth who do not have a stable primary nighttime residence that meets basic needs are considered homeless.
2. An ideal way of examining differences between runaway and thrownaway experiences would be to create a variable with mutually exclusive categories: youth who ran away, youth who were thrown out by parents, and youth who experienced both. Unfortunately, sample sizes do not allow us to do this in models separated by gender. While youth who ran away were more likely to be thrown out and vice versa, the fact that the group of young men and women who experienced both was smaller than the runaway or thrownaway groups suggests that these are distinct experiences. We did test models with this categorical measure, and found that the estimated effects of running away vs. being thrown out were substantively similar to results presented here, but were not always statistically significant.