LGBD Community in the United States

Undoubtedly, the United States has a significant amount of its population who identify themselves as being lesbian, gay or bisexual (Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2012). Moreover, as the population keeps aging, the need for more frequent health care accompanies the phenomenon. Although the number of older adults who are part of the LGB community tends to keep growing, this group still find themselves receiving different treatments from heterosexual older adults, and one of the areas in which they still have not achieved equality is health care.

Taking that in consideration, Fredriksen-Goldsen et al. (2012) designed an experiment to collect qualitative data in order to examine the factors that contribute to better health among the LGB older community and the factors that negatively influence the outcomes. Furthermore, this research shows great importance because the topic does not receive enough attention in society, and some changes should definitely be made in order to satisfy the LGB older adults’ needs. In addition, the conclusion of the experiment should allow professionals in the area to realize the direction in which they should work to fix the issue (Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2012).In order to collect data for this study, 2,349 LGB older adults were selected to answer survey questions (Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2012).

For this scenario, in particular, older adults consist of individuals above the age 50. However, the average age within the sample was 67 years old. Moreover, more than a half of the sample was composed by gay and bisexual older men, whether just about one third was composed by lesbians and bisexual older women. In addition to that, only 13% of the individuals were part of ethnical/racial minority groups. The measures used were standardized, which resulted in the collection of qualitative data.

Furthermore, the study was cross-sectional, so the results acquired were compared among the groups for each sexual orientation and factors (Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2012).Results from the study have shown that poor general health, disability, and depression were reported by many LGB older adults (Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2012). Moreover, difficulty in affording health care, smoking, obesity, internalized stigma, and lifetime victimization were found to impact the numerous reports of mental health problems. On the other hand, it was also found that some protective factors can contribute to better results.

Therefore, the implication of the outcomes is that interventions involving protective factors could help the LGB community to have better mental health. As a consequence, it was concluded through the study that resilience theory can be used to identify the reasons for the disparity between LGB older adults and their heterosexual counterparts for this specific issue (Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2012).Undoubtedly, the study described above has strengths regarding its methodology. First, each condition, which are poor general health, disability, and depression, had three models for logistic regression (Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2012). As a consequence, results are more likely to have accuracy since the variables were adjusted for different circumstances. Moreover, each variable was tested individually, which decreases the possibility of error.

Therefore, the results are more accurate and reliable since they were carefully collected. However, some weakness present in the study’s methodology limits its results. The sample’s demographics, for instance, were very unbalanced. The number of women participating in the study was almost half of the number of men participating. Furthermore, inside of these two categories, there was an uneven distribution between homosexual and bisexual individuals. Subsequently, the comparison between results collected for each subcategory seems to lack precision due to the significant number of participants that fit in each group (Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2012).

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