Advancing measurement of gender and sexual dimensions of adolescent mental health and wellbeing: Addressing a missing link

推进对青少年心理健康和福祉的性别和性维度的衡量：解决缺失的环节

• 批准号: MR/X003256/1
• 负责人: Kirstin Mitchell
• 金额: $ 38.37万
• 依托单位: University of Glasgow
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=MR%2FX003256%2F1
• 关键词: Advancing; measurement; gender; sexual; dimensions

Why we are doing this project: Mental health problems are increasing among young people. There is lots of research being done to understand why this is happening, and to explore the factors that protect young people from poor mental health and support their wellbeing. This research usually focuses on things like school pressures, family and friendships, social media use and sleep, but rarely explores issues relating to gender/sexual identity and sexual feelings and experiences. The lack of attention to these issues in mental health research is worrying because young people say they are important. As they develop, young people explore new sexual feelings and curiosities about sex (or worry about their absence of feelings and experiences); they consider their own sense of having a particular gender and sexuality; and they learn to express sexual feelings and form intimate relationships. Sexuality development is normal and healthy but can also involve difficult and harmful experiences, thoughts and feelings including shame and stigma. So far, research has mainly focused on understanding how risky and difficult experiences (such as forced sex) can lead to problems like depression and anxiety. Much less is known about how anxiety and depression affects sexual feelings and behaviour, or how healthy and positive sexual experiences contribute to feelings of wellbeing. Reluctance to ask about sex in mental health research may be based on concerns about getting funding to do the research; worries about backlash from parents and the media; fears that such questions might upset young people; and lack of confidence about which questions to ask and how. A lack of research into sexual matters in mental wellbeing research influences the support that is given to young people, which means that young people can feel their sexual concerns are not being acknowledged or addressed. This needs to change.What we will do: We create tools and resources to help mental health researchers and those who provide mental health services to ask the right questions to understand links between mental health hand sexual wellbeing, and to ensure that young people's concerns are properly understood. How we will do it: We will begin by holding workshops with young people, parents, researchers, policy makers and practitioners to understand priorities and challenges of researching gender and sexual issues in mental health. Next, we will add to those understandings by reviewing existing research on the topic. We will then collect existing survey questions that cover these priority topics and review those questions so that we can recommend the most trustworthy ones to researchers and give advice on how to use them. It is very likely that some priority topics are not covered by existing questions, so we will fill the most important gaps by creating and testing some new questions. One gap we have already identified is for a set of questions on adolescent sexual wellbeing. We will fill that gap by designing a new set of questions (known as a measure) using group discussion and interviews with young people. We will check how well the measure works by testing it in an online survey of 1500 young people aged 14-19. We will bring all our work together into a website of resources for researchers, ethics committees (who review and approve research plans), and schools. We will train these stakeholders on research on young people's gender and sexual development, and we will share our findings with researchers, policy makers, mental health practitioners, and young people.What we hope to achieve: We aim for better understanding of the links between sexuality and mental health in adolescence by bringing greater attention to the issues and producing excellent research tools and guidance focused on young people's priorities.

为什么我们要做这个项目：年轻人的心理健康问题越来越多。有很多研究正在进行，以了解为什么会发生这种情况，并探索保护年轻人免受心理健康不良和支持他们的健康的因素。这项研究通常集中在学校压力，家庭和友谊，社交媒体使用和睡眠等方面，但很少探讨与性别/性身份以及性感受和体验有关的问题。在心理健康研究中缺乏对这些问题的关注令人担忧，因为年轻人认为这些问题很重要。随着他们的成长，年轻人探索新的性感觉和对性的好奇心（或担心他们没有感觉和经验）;他们考虑自己对特定性别和性的感觉;他们学会表达性感觉并建立亲密关系。性发展是正常和健康的，但也可能涉及困难和有害的经历，思想和感情，包括羞耻和耻辱。到目前为止，研究主要集中在了解风险和困难的经历（如强迫性行为）如何导致抑郁和焦虑等问题。关于焦虑和抑郁如何影响性感觉和性行为，或者健康和积极的性体验如何有助于幸福感，人们知之甚少。心理健康研究中不愿询问性问题可能是基于对获得研究资金的担忧;担心父母和媒体的反弹;担心这样的问题可能会让年轻人感到不安;以及对问什么问题以及如何问缺乏信心。在心理健康研究中缺乏对性问题的研究影响了对年轻人的支持，这意味着年轻人可以感觉到他们的性问题没有得到承认或解决。我们将做什么：我们创建工具和资源，帮助心理健康研究人员和提供心理健康服务的人员提出正确的问题，以了解心理健康与性健康之间的联系，并确保年轻人的担忧得到正确的理解。我们将如何做到这一点：我们将开始与年轻人，父母，研究人员，政策制定者和从业人员举行研讨会，了解研究性别和性问题在心理健康方面的优先事项和挑战。接下来，我们将通过回顾有关该主题的现有研究来补充这些理解。然后，我们将收集涵盖这些优先主题的现有调查问题，并审查这些问题，以便我们可以向研究人员推荐最值得信赖的问题，并就如何使用它们提出建议。很有可能一些优先主题没有被现有的问题所覆盖，所以我们将通过创建和测试一些新的问题来填补最重要的空白。我们已经确定的一个差距是关于青少年性健康的一系列问题。我们将通过小组讨论和与年轻人的访谈设计一套新的问题（称为衡量标准）来填补这一空白。我们将通过对1500名14-19岁的年轻人进行在线调查来检验这一措施的效果。我们将把我们所有的工作放在一起，为研究人员，伦理委员会（审查和批准研究计划）和学校提供资源。我们将对这些利益相关者进行关于青少年性别和性发展研究的培训，并将与研究人员、政策制定者、心理健康从业人员和青少年分享我们的研究结果。我们的目标是更好地了解青春期性行为与心理健康之间的联系，方法是更多地关注这些问题，并制作出色的研究工具和指导，重点关注年轻人的心理健康。优先事项