Alberta Student Perspectives of Gender and Sexual Orientation (GSA) Clubs and Parental Acceptance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the 1990s, Alberta students have fostered school-based spaces called GSA clubs, a popular acronym for a student-led and teacher-supported club that provides a social space and resources for 2SLGBTQ+ students and their allies (originally called a Gay-Straight Alliance). My dissertation uses a 3-phase multi-method approach to examine the experiences of Alberta students in school-based GSAs, specifically regarding student club participation and their feelings of parental acceptance. Using a quantitative survey method, Phase 1 examined the GSA functioning, parental communication, and parental acceptance from the perspective of 71 students between the ages of 12 and 18 from 11 schools across 9 Alberta school districts. Phase 2 employed a qualitative descriptive method involving semi-structured individual interviews with 8 of the Phase 1 survey participants to further investigate students’ experiences of their GSA and parental acceptance. Phase 3 involved a Youth Participatory Action activity comprising of 15 participants between grades 7 and 12 from 11 schools across 9 Alberta school divisions. The purpose of Phase 3 was to involve student voices in the process of my data analysis and in shaping the resources created from my doctoral research. My key findings are that a) GSA clubs are welcoming joy-filled safe spaces that provide important social supports, fun activities, a place of reprieve from less supportive environments, and opportunities for leadership; b) Each student’s feelings of parental acceptance is based on the unique relationship they have to each parent combined with communication quality and personal identity development. Furthermore, parent-child relationships are complex and there are many factors youth consider when deciding to disclose their identity or GSA involvement to their parents. Overall, parents were more accepting than rejecting of their child’s sexual orientation and gender identity, however not all participants were out to their parents and attributed this to a need for improvements in parent-child communication alongside parental awareness and support of 2SLGBTQ+ identities. Students with better parent-child communication felt more supported by their parents regarding their sexual orientation and gender identity. Similarly, students who experienced greater parental support also disclosed their sexual orientation and/or gender identity to more of their parents. Students expressed the need for more resources for GSAs, parents, and the public, especially around navigating coming out and the public’s understanding of what GSA clubs entail. Limitations and future directions involving research and the dissemination of accessible resources will also be discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".