Parental Consent in Sexuality Research Posted on March 19, 2007 Obtaining parental consent requires honesty, advises Joel W. Grube (bio).

Parental consent is an issue particularly in the areas of sexuality where we're conducting studies and when we started our first study in this area, I was terrified. Of a couple of things. One, I thought we would never get parents to agree to let us interview their 12-13-14-year-old daughters and sons about their sexual behaviors and attitudes. The second thing I had an image of myself being sued because some parent found out that we were asking more than they thought.

Interestingly we ran a focus group that was designed not to get to kids and ask kids what they were doing but really to ask parents what can we do to get, if we were trying to get you to give us permission to interview your child, what is it that we could do to make things easier for you or to make you feel more at ease about this.

And a number of interesting things came out of that group. One, of course, was it pays to be pretty much totally honest with the parents and pretty explicitly telling them what you're going to be asking about. And surprisingly they didn't respond as negatively as we had thought when we brought the topic up.

But the second thing that surprised us is that we had recruited our focus groups on the basis of political and religious conservatism and liberalism and our thought was that the group we needed to be most concerned about getting cooperation would be out of the conservative parents, because they wouldn't want their children talking about these topics. As it turned out, they were the least concerned. It turns out this particular study was on media and adolescent sexuality and the effects of media. And I suspect that that's a topic that the more, in this particular case, the more conservative parents thought was interesting and important and they were concerned about it.

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