Study sheds light on an overlooked group

Lesbian, gay and bisexual people who are over 50, says Bethany Perkins Detwiler, make up a little-studied segment of America’s population. Experts have estimated that as many as 2 million sexual minority older adults live in the United States and that their numbers will grow as the nation’s aging population increases.

“A lot of research has been done on young and middle-aged LGB persons,” says Detwiler, who earned a Ph.D. in counseling psychology last spring, “but older sexual minority populations have been overlooked. And being older, these persons are also likely to experience ageism and discrimination in services.”

Three years ago, Detwiler began studying older LGB adults for her doctoral thesis in the College of Education. Last spring, she received the Elizabeth Stout Dissertation Award, which is given annually for doctoral dissertation that are judged to have made unusually significant and original contributions in their fields. One doctoral candidate from each of Lehigh’s four colleges wins the award, which was endowed by the late Robert Stout, former dean of the graduate school, in memory of his wife.

For her Ph.D. thesis, Detwiler completed an online survey of 189 people who are at least 50 years old and who report having some degree of same-sex attraction. Her study revealed that older LGB adults, in dealing with discrimination, find more help from social support groups and from networks of friends and family members than they do from accessing their self-esteem.

More generally, Detwiler concluded that prejudice is strongly linked to psychological distress and reduced quality of life, and that external events of prejudice are more significant in this regard than the internal stressors of having a concealed LGB identity and internalized homonegativity.

Stories behind the numbers

As an undergraduate student at Allegheny College, Detwiler spent much of her time at “Active Aging,” a center for older adults.

“I found that I loved working with that population and hearing the stories they told,” she says. “I organized events, I was a bingo caller, and one summer, I was the manager. We held a yearly senior prom and we planned the evening with a theme. They loved it.”

When she decided to pursue a Ph.D. at Lehigh, Detwiler chose Grace Caskie, associate professor of counseling psychology, as her adviser. Caskie studies health, cognition and daily functioning in older adults.

“Aging was on my radar when I came to Lehigh,” says Detwiler. “As for my interest in the LGB community, one of the values of counseling psychology is to try to understand and alleviate oppression and to shed light on people who have less of a voice.”

Detwiler studied older LGB adults using the Minority Stress Theory, which was developed by Ilan H. Meyer, a social psychologist and senior scholar with the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA’s School of Law.

“The Minority Stress Theory,” Detwiler says, “is a framework that assumes that racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to experience additional stress in their day-to-day activities because of the fact that they hold minority identities. This stress can be from overt or subtle discrimination.

“Meyer has applied Minority Stress Theory to LGB people but I was the first researcher to apply it to older adults.”

To find respondents for her survey, Detwiler posted notes on Facebook pages with a link to her survey. She used List-serve and talked to groups on Yahoo and Google. She sought permission to run ads in newsletters and she contacted churches.

Drafting the survey questions was perhaps the biggest challenge of her project, she says.

“There is a lot of difficulty in studying LGB people because of the stigma around sexual identity,” she says. “Just by clicking on the link, you’re already expressing your sexual identity. This makes it hard to write a welcoming online survey. I did a lot of research on other studies and how they captured the nuances of sexual identity.

“But no matter how hard I tried to be inclusive, I missed a lot. Some of the people who took the survey were very vocal. They emailed me with critical feedback, such as, ‘Your survey did not capture my story. It asked my age when I came out. But in reality, I didn’t come out—people outed me.’”

Other respondents told Detwiler that a question about their relationship with their families overlooked the fact that family can refer to the family one grew up with, one’s family now, or a family of choice created through friends.

“I learned a lot from the emails; it was nice to connect with the participants,” says Detwiler. “But it was a really humbling experience.”

Another challenge, says Detwiler, was working within the confines of a quantitative research project, in which each response is assigned a numerical value.

“Counseling psychology is grounded in the values of social justice and multicultural sensitivity,” she says. “But there are limits when doing quantitative research. You can’t include everyone’s story and personal experience. It requires creativity to ask better questions about sexual orientation in order to capture more experiences.

“My recommendation is that in the future someone should examine the same topic from a qualitative perspective by telling people’s experiences and stories.”

Detwiler is now a postdoctoral resident in Lehigh’s Counseling Center, where she provides individual and group therapy for graduate and undergraduate students, conducts outreach on campus, and does assessment and testing. This fall, she will teach a course called Human Development and Lifespan for the counseling psychology program.

In her five years as a doctoral candidate, Detwiler worked at the University of Pennsylvania Counseling Center and at the Lenape Valley Foundation, which offers mental health and substance abuse services. She also joined with Arpana Inman, chair of the counseling psychology program, to help establish the Community Voices Clinic, a free mental health clinic at Donegan Elementary and Broughal Middle Schools. In that role, she developed a training program and supervised graduate students who treat children and families.

Detwiler’s short-term goal is to become licensed as a psychologist. Looking further into the future, she would like to be a training director at a college counseling center.

“I have a real passion for training new clinicians,” she says. “I love shaping new ideas and new projects.”

Story by Kurt Pfitzer

Photo by Christa Neu