The Daily Campus

Issue date: 4/16/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Matt Lin Mary Crawford, professor of psychology at UConn, discussed the psychological research focused on lesbians and bisexual women that had been published from 1975 to 2001.

On Wednesday, "Out to Lunch," the interdisciplinary lecture series that focuses on queer studies, invited Mary Crawford, a professor of psychology here at UConn, to lecture on lesbian and bisexual women in the eyes of scientific psychology.

Students gathered at the Rainbow Center to listen to Crawford describe her research project on the social construction of homosexuality.

Working with now assistant professor at National Chegchi University in Taipei Japan, I-Ching Lee, Crawford has examined published works on lesbian and bisexual women from 1975 to 2001. Together, the two have investigated the increases in lesbian and bisexual research and the evolution of societal opinion of sexual minorities.

As Crawford states, her research sought to answer several key questions, including what percent of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people are included in research studies.

After examining articles over a 26-year period, it was found that less than 1 percent of all journal articles related to psychology dealt with LGB people.

The second question their researched raised was, "Has the amount of research increased over time?"

Sorting through over 500 journal articles, she and her colleague found that while the amount of literature increased on gays and lesbians over the 26-year time period, the abundance of research on the psychology of bisexual men and women alone were negligible.

While Crawford says she was pleased with the results, the findings were also a cause for concern for her. She stated that the fact that articles pertaining to GLB people make up less than 1 percent of all psychology journal articles, and the near complete lack of articles on bisexual women and even men was something that should be considered harmful.

While Kristin Van Ness, an 8th-semester psychology major agrees with Crawford, she also sees a silver lining in the findings.

"It was nice to find what's out there because as a psychology major I'm thinking about what I'm going to do when I graduate. This is an area of interest for me and I suppose that while it's bad [that there's no research on the subject], it's good to know what topics are out there that still need to be looked into."

Regardless of the findings, for Andrea LaFleche, also a psychology major, the lecture itself was cause for celebration.

"This is probably the first time I've heard any psychology professor talk about this issue," LaFleche said. "It was refreshing."

Mary Crawford was recently the recipient of the Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant for her research in Nepal and is currently working on a book which spotlights sex trafficking and women in that country.

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