In recent years, leading scholars in the field of sexology have been calling for more professionals who are primarily sexologists rather than professionals in other fields who specialize in sexuality. Such professionals require specialized training that meets their specific needs. The Sexuality Attitude Reassessment (SAR) has been established as a routine training intervention for sexuality professionals. The SAR has been used to train American sexologists and other helping professionals to be sensitive to sexual diversity and the sexual behavior of others. Attempts have been made to measure the SAR's effectiveness using several different measures and the research has yielded inconsistent and contradictory results. These measures traditionally look for changes in knowledge and attitudes. The authors of this work posit that a new construct must be developed to measure the success of the SAR as a method of sensitivity training. The proposed construct, sexological worldview, is demonstrated to be a more pertinent construct than attitude change.
Although there are an ever-growing number of sexual minority therapists, many are supervised by heterosexual supervisors who are not knowledgeable about sexual minority issues, which impact the sexual minority therapist and her/his interactions with their clients (Halpert & Pfaller, 2001;Pfohl, 2004). In light of this, the authors designed a qualitative inquiry based in a one-semester sexual minority supervision group. Participants included self-identified sexual minority human service professionals in graduate school. Themes that emerged in the group involved professional and community identities, self-disclosure, organizational culture, and the role of advocacy and fighting oppression. The benefits of such supervision and the subsequent implications of this research will be discussed.
The authors originally posited that a new construct must be developed to measure the success of affective training for sexologists, particularly the Sexuality Attitudes Reassessment (SAR) modality. Couching their critique in studies that have been conducted to measure the SAR's effectiveness as a method used to evoke perspective transformation and more sensitive and humanistic service provision, the authors argued that the development of a professional's sexological worldview would be a more accurate construct than attitude change to measure when considering the outcomes of SAR training. This study in the United States used a two-phase qualitative approach to validate the proposed sexological worldview construct. In the first phase, they surveyed a panel of 16 sexologists regarding their original proposed definition of sexological worldview and refined it. In the second phase, they completed 30 one-on-one interviews with a convenience sample of sexologists and sexology students. Using an inductive content analysis of the interview transcripts, seven themes emerged in support of the proposed definition of sexological worldview, including its components and its developmental characteristics. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for the use of the construct for the training of sexologists.
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