Publications

The publications listed below are organized by project. Each article contains an abstract and PDF link. For full citations, please view Dr. Sara McClelland’s CV here.

Reproductive Justice | Intimate Justice | Feminist Methods | Adolescent Sexuality | Conceptual Analysis | Illness & Intimacy

 

Reproductive Justice

 

This line of research concerns policies that support or impede people's reproductive health, including abortion, sex ed, and access to contraception. Our focus in this area has been on racist and sexist stereotypes driving policy makers and researchers.

  • Baker, M. R., McClelland, S. I., & Jozkowski, K. N. (2022) [pdf here]

    Attitudes towards abortion play a significant historical and contemporary role in U.S. politics. Research has documented the influence of racist and sexist attitudes in Americans’ political opinions, yet the role of these attitudes has largely been absent in psychological research about abortion. We hypothesized that racism and sexism, originating from historically-rooted stereotypes about Black women’s sexuality and motherhood, would be related to abortion attitudes. In Study 1, we recruited three samples—Black (n=401), Latinx (n=316), and White (n=343) individuals diverse in age, gender, and abortion identity—to complete an online survey assessing abortion attitudes, symbolic racism, modern sexism, and religiosity. Results were consistent with hypotheses: antipathy and resistance to the equality of African Americans (racism) or women (sexism) related to individuals’ negative abortion attitudes, above and beyond religiosity, in all three samples. In Study 2, we partially replicated these findings using data from the 2012 American National Election Studies (ANES). Moreover, we extended Study 1’s findings by demonstrating that racism and/or sexism predicted opposition to abortion while controlling for political ideology among White (n=2,344) and Black (n=500) individuals but not Latinx individuals (n=318). These studies demonstrated that exclusionary ideologies (i.e., racist and sexist attitudes) relate to individuals’ abortion attitudes. These findings may assist researchers and policy makers with interpreting a more comprehensive picture of the racist and sexist attitudes that individuals possibly draw upon when responding to questions about abortion, including voting, answering polls, or supporting political candidates.

  • Baker, M.R., Papp L. J., Crawford, B. L., & McClelland, S. I. (2022) [pdf here]

    Prior to and since the 2022 Dobbs decision, U.S. state laws have endorsed individuals surveilling and punishing those associated with abortion care. This practice presents an urgent need to understand the characteristics of abortion stigma, particularly the perspectives of individuals with stigmatizing beliefs. To examine the concept and characteristics of abortion stigma, we interviewed 55 individuals about whether they thought there should be consequences for getting an abortion and, if so, what the consequences should be. Adults from three states (Michigan, Kansas, and Arizona) were purposively sampled to include a range of abortion identities and levels of religious engagement. We used reflexive thematic analysis to code and interpret the data. Participants imagined consequences including financial penalties, incarceration, and forced sterilization. Three themes highlighted how abortion was described as violating the law, women’s gender roles, and religious doctrine; accordingly, abortion was imagined as deserving of negative consequences, although abortion was legal in all states during data collection. We argue that these imagined consequences relied on carceral logics and interconnected sexist, racist, and classist stereotypes that reflect and reproduce abortion stigma. This study deepens the understanding of abortion stigma from the perspective of the stigmatizer, underscoring the danger of legislation grounded in stigmatizing beliefs.

  • McClelland, S. I., Dutcher, H., & Crawford, B. (2020) [pdf here]

    We investigated the content of survey items to assess whether and how racist and sexist stereotypes are woven into the fabric of research on attitudes about abortion in the United States. We collected and analyzed a comprehensive set of survey items (456 items from 80 studies) used in peer‐reviewed research published from 2008 to 2018 in representative and nonrepresentative studies of U.S. respondents. Our analysis was guided by historical narratives that have been influential in shaping representations of women and reproduction in the United States (e.g., the Moynihan Report). With this background, we developed three themes pertaining to how individuals’ attitudes about abortion are measured: we found that items rely on (1) moral, (2) sexual, and (3) financial evaluations of women seeking abortion care. These themes highlighted implicit and explicit judgments of women, including representations of them as unwilling to partner with men and as fiscally and sexually irresponsible. We argue that survey items meant to objectively assess abortion attitudes draw on negative racial and gender stereotypes and that these stereotypes then travel widely under the veneer of scientific objectivity. Critical methods, such as the item bank analysis described in this study, are crucial to discern how inequality, prejudice, and discrimination can be reproduced in the fabric of research methods. In our discussion, we offer suggestions for researchers to reduce these and related forms of bias in survey‐based abortion research.

  • Dutcher, H., & McClelland, S. I. (2019) [pdf here]

    Definitions of “safe sex” often focus on the use of condoms and contraception, but largely ignore other dimensions of safety, such as efforts to feel emotionally or physically safe. These gaps in the definition of the term safety demand greater attention to how being safe and feeling safe are interpreted by individuals who live and engage in sexual lives marked by social and political inequality. In the current study, we draw on interviews with 17 young women ages 18–28 from a U.S. urban university to examine efforts they used to protect themselves in sexual relationships. When having sex with men, we found young women relied on a range of efforts to keep themselves safe, such as controlling their own sexual desire, developing strict contraceptive regimens, and building relational contexts characterized by physical and emotional safety.We argue that sexual safety labor (i.e., “good” contraceptive behavior, “waiting” to have sex, and “careful” decision-making) offers evidence of what safe sex requires of young women.We examine this range of cognitions and behaviors as forms of labor directed at making sex feel and be safe; however, young women did not describe these efforts in terms of their own time or energy. In our analysis, we suggest that vigilance in sexual relationships has become part of young women’s required repertoire of safe sex behaviors, but largely goes unnoticed by them. We connect these findings with public health campaigns that teach young people about safety and offer alternatives for researchers looking to understand and study what is imagined as “safe sex.”

  • McClelland, S. I., & Frost, D. M. (2014) [pdf here]

    This chapter examines social policies as they relate to five qualities of sexuality: sexual knowledge, sexual behavior, reproduction and family formation, the sexual body, and institutional infrastructures designed to address sexuality issues. These entry points represent sites of leverage where social policies enter the intimate space. These five entry points are not exhaustive, nor are they mutually exclusive. By distinguishing these five entry points, however, it is possible to focus on specific ways that governance and bodies relate—that is, by regulating what individuals know about sex, how they behave, mate, reproduce, and how infrastructures are supported or dismantled through social policies. The metaphor of entry points directs us to look beyond a specific policy and look, instead, at how policies aim to lodge inside the body. Resisting the urge to describe social policies as primarily social (and existing only on the outside of the individual), the metaphor of entry points compels us to investigate psychological consequences, effects, and outcomes at the juncture of where the person and their environments meet (Lewin, 1935).

  • McClelland, S.I., & Fine, M (2008) [pdf here]

    Since 1982, more than US $1 billion have been spent through federally sponsored abstinence-only-until-marriage (AOUM) programs, including nearly $800 million between 2001 and 2006, during the presidency of George W. Bush. With this increased funding has come pressure to evaluate the impact of AOUM programs. In 1998, a federally funded evaluation of AOUM programming was commissioned to assess its impact on young people. Because the abstinence policies and the evaluation of their success derive from the federal government, the authors identify the troubling potential of "embedded science." Using a recent example of research in the field of abstinence-only education (Maynard et al., 2005), the authors identify a number of practices and consequences of embedding research science within existing public policy. They find that when evaluation research is overly embedded, it tends to be dominated by political ideologies, information is omitted, and critique is virtually absent.

  • Fine, M., & McClelland, S. I. (2007) [pdf here]

    In this Article, we argue that contemporary public policies on adolescent sexuality are being designed in ways that (1) significantly limit young women’s access to information and health care regarding sexual behaviors and sexual desire; (2) diminish the supports available to young women, including those who have experienced sexual violence, risk, and/or danger; (3) limit the professional license of educators and health workers who typically support teens in their sexual and reproductive decision making; and (4) circumscribe the options available to young women who experience sexual desire or sexual violence in the name of protecting the young. We analyze how certain groups of already marginalized young women, such as young women of color, those with disabilities, lesbians, and young women in poverty, suffer more severely as the public sphere shifts away from offering support and instead toward punishment for sexual activity. To investigate our thesis, we analyze three specific public policies: (1) the federally funded proliferation of abstinence-only-until-marriage education in schools and communities; (2) the refusal to grant young women over-the-counter access to emergency contraception, and (3) requirements of parental consent or notification for an abortion. In this Article we include a brief history of each policy, the current implementation of the policy, and the consequences of each policy for women under eighteen, with particular attention to how these consequences are unequally distributed among young women based on their race or class or both.

  • Fine, M., & McClelland, S. I. (2006) [pdf here]

    Nearly twenty years after the publication of Michelle Fine's essay "Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire," the question of how sexuality education influences the development and health of adolescents remains just as relevant as it was in 1988. In this article, Michelle Fine and Sara McClelland examine the federal promotion of curricula advocating abstinence only until marriage in public schools and, in particular, how these policies constrict the development of "thick desire" in young women. Their findings highlight the fact that national policies have an uneven impact on young people and disproportionately place the burden on girls, youth of color, teens with disabilities, and lesbian/gay/bisexual/ transgender youth. With these findings in mind, the authors provide a set of research guidelines to encourage researchers, policymakers, and advocates as they collect data on, develop curricula for, and change the contexts in which young people are educated about sexuality and health.

Intimate Justice

 

In 2009, McClelland developed the term "intimate justice" to describe the normalization of mistreatment (of oneself and others) in the sexual and relational spheres. Intimate justice, as an analytic perspective, argues that researchers must include measures, methods, and theories in their research designs that prioritize the role of political inequality in how people imagine (and report on) their intimate lives.

  • Higgins, J. A., & McClelland, S. I. (2023) [pdf here]

    The concept of ‘erotic equity’ can help fill in some of the gaps regarding sexual flourishing and social inequalities. Our use of the term ‘flourishing’ is indebted to earlier articulations of the conditions necessary for a human to thrive developed by Nussbaum and Sen (1993). Their work set the stage for understanding the crucial roles that poverty and uneven resource distribution play in disrupting and impeding flourishing. Building from this work, we define erotic equity as people’s access to sexual pleasure and well-being, including how social systems or structures enable or constrain these positive sexual experiences (Higgins, Lands, et al. 2022). As a result of societal inequalities and structural power imbalances, individuals have unequal access to sexual pleasure and well-being. Erotic inequities are patterned by multiple axes of inequality, including those linked to gender and sexual identity. For example, gender identity can facilitate, or fail to facilitate, positive aspects of sexuality. Research on the orgasm gap reveals that in heterosexual relationships, people with penises are much more likely to have orgasms than people with clitorises, despite similar abilities to achieve orgasm while masturbating (Mahar et al. 2020). Discrimination such as homophobia and transphobia also undermine sexual flourishing by limiting the sexual and relational imaginations of all individuals and threatening to punish those who imagine more capacious gender and/or sexual lives. In addition to considering social and structural power imbalances such as gender and sexual identity, researchers have also examined how social institutions from schools to organised religion influence sexual well-being.

  • Higgins, J. A., Lands, M., Ufot, M., & McClelland, S. I. (2022) [pdf here]

    Sexual health includes positive aspects of sexuality and the possibility of having pleasurable sexual experiences. However, few researchers examine how socioeconomic conditions shape sexual wellbeing. This paper presents the concept of “erotic equity,” which refers to how social and structural systems enable, or fail to enable, positive aspects of sexuality. In part one, we use this concept to consider potential pathways through which socioeconomic conditions, especially poverty, may shape sexuality. Part two builds from this theoretical framework to review the empirical literature that documents associations between socioeconomics and sexual wellbeing. This narrative review process located 47 studies from more than 22 countries. Forty-four studies indicated that individuals who reported more constrained socioeconomic conditions, primarily along the lines of income, education, and occupation, also reported poorer indicators of sexual wellbeing, especially satisfaction and overall functioning. Most studies used unidimensional measures of socioeconomic status, treating them as individual-level control variables; few documented socioeconomics as structural pathways through which erotic inequities may arise. Based on these limitations, in part three we make calls for the integration of socioeconomic conditions into sexuality researchers’ paradigms of multi-level influences on sexuality.

  • Papp, L. J., & McClelland, S. I. (2021) [pdf here]

    National estimates indicate that approximately 1 in 5 women will experience sexual assault during her time in college. However, measures of assault often exclude “mild” experiences, such as incidents of unwanted touching that were not preceded by force, incapacitation, or coercion. We aimed to document the characteristics of “mild” sexual assault and aggression that college women experience at large parties and bars. In addition, we considered women’s descriptions of assaultive and aggressive incidents in the context of campus climate survey items to evaluate the potential for measurement gaps. Across six focus groups (N = 36) at a large, public university in the midwestern U.S., women described routine experiences of “mild” sexual assault and aggression, so common that often only imprecise counts of their frequency (e.g., “all the time”) were possible. Our findings document the many forms and frequencies of “mild” assault and aggression in college women’s lives, as well as the limits of campus climate surveys in measuring the mundane sexual mistreatment of women in campus life. We develop the term “sexualized aggression” to capture such mistreatment and situate this concept within the larger body of research on campus sexual violence.

  • Dutcher, H., & McClelland, S. I. (2019) [pdf here]

    Definitions of "safe sex" often focus on the use of condoms and contraception, but largely ignore other dimensions of safety, such as efforts to feel emotionally or physically safe. These gaps in the definition of the term safety demand greater attention to how being safe and feeling safe are interpreted by individuals who live and engage in sexual lives marked by social and political inequality. In the current study, we draw on interviews with 17 young women ages 18–28 from a U.S. urban university to examine efforts they used to protect themselves in sexual relationships. When having sex with men, we found young women relied on a range of efforts to keep themselves safe, such as controlling their own sexual desire, developing strict contraceptive regimens, and building relational contexts characterized by physical and emotional safety. We argue that sexual safety labor (i.e., "good" contraceptive behavior, "waiting" to have sex, and "careful" decision-making) offers evidence of what safe sex requires of young women. We examine this range of cognitions and behaviors as forms of labor directed at making sex feel and be safe; however, young women did not describe these efforts in terms of their own time or energy. In our analysis, we suggest that vigilance in sexual relationships has become part of young women’s required repertoire of safe sex behaviors, but largely goes unnoticed by them. We connect these findings with public health campaigns that teach young people about safety and offer alternatives for researchers looking to understand and study what is imagined as "safe sex.”

  • McClelland, S. I. (2017) [pdf here]

    Feminist researchers have highlighted the increased hyper- and heterosexualization of breast cancer by drawing attention to the gendered dimensions of disease. In a set of interviews with women diagnosed with metastatic disease, I examined how participants labored to fulfill feminine gender and sexual ideals. Two themes were explored: gender labor, which included feeling fat and unattractive, and sexual labor, which included managing partners' sexual demands and sexual pain. This study builds on emergent feminist critiques that challenge expectations for a woman to be a “sexy cancer patient” and highlights how gender and sexual ideals continue to affect women negatively, even when they are extremely ill.

  • Bell, S. N., & McClelland, S. I. (2017) [pdf here]

    While cultural ideas about "healthy" and "fulfilling" sexuality often include orgasm, many young women do not experience orgasm during partnered sex. The current study examined how women described this absence of orgasm in their sexual experiences with male partners. We examined interviews (N = 17) with women ages 18 to 28 and focused on their ideas about orgasm and their explanations concerning when and why they do not orgasm. We explored three themes that illustrate the strategies young women use to contend with orgasmic absence: (1) What's the big deal?; (2) It's just biology; and (3) Not now, but someday. We found that young women's explanations allowed them to reduce feelings of abnormality and enabled them to distance themselves from sexual expectations regarding the perceived value of orgasm. In analyzing the complicated gender and sexual dynamics surrounding orgasm, we turned to Fahs' (2014) work on sexual freedom and the importance of articulating freedom from sexual obligations as a key intervention in critical sexuality research. In our discussion, we examine the implications of our findings for critical researchers looking to better understand the role of sexual norms in how young women imagine and discuss the role of pleasure in their own sexual lives.

  • McClelland, S. I., Rubin, J. D., & Bauermeister, J. A. (2016) [pdf here]

    A podcast conversation with McClelland and editor of PWQ is available here.

    In this study, we link together moments of discrimination described by young bisexual women. We do so in order to theorize about associations between negative stereotypes heard early in one’s life and later minimization of personal discrimination. Using interviews with 13 young women, we sought to understand the types of negative messages participants heard about “bi/sexuality” as well as the ways that they perceived or did not perceive themselves as having experienced discrimination related to their sexuality.

    We found that family members and friends often described participants’ bisexuality as “disgusting,” “difficult to understand,” or “hot,” and participants described their own experiences with discrimination as “no big deal.” We use this analysis to build on previous research concerning microaggressions, sexual stigma, and denial of discrimination to discuss how familial, social, and political environments create a set of conditions in which later injustices are imagined as normative and inevitable.

    Finally, we discuss the methodological dilemmas facing feminist psychologists who aim to analyze discrimination and the challenges in documenting individuals’ experiences of stigma, which may be imagined as no big deal to individuals, but are in fact unjust. It is imperative to develop strategies to recognize, document, and critically assess how injustice becomes all too normal for some and the role that feminist psychology can play in changing this.

  • McClelland, S. I. (2014) [pdf here]

    Virtual special issue on "Constructing Sexualities in Feminism & Psychology” can be found here

    Not enough is understood about the role of gender norms and sexual stigma in shaping individuals’ definitions of sexual satisfaction. The current study aimed to investigate the heterogeneity of definitions of sexual satisfaction in a sample of young adults, ages 18–28 (M = 22.6; SD = 4.78). Forty US participants (50% females; 45% LGBTQ; 53% white) sorted 63 statements about sexual satisfaction using a Q methodology design (Watts and Stenner, 2005), followed by semi-structured interviews. This mixed methods procedure enabled both a systematic and in-depth examination of the dimensions participants prioritized when determining their sexual satisfaction. Analysis of participants’ Q sorts indicated four distinct perspectives on sexual satisfaction: emotional and masculine; relational and feminine; partner focused; and orgasm focused. These four factors were further explored using participants’ interview data. Findings indicated that individuals interpreted sexual satisfaction using several key dimensions not regularly included in survey research. Existing survey items do not regularly attend to the gendered and heteronormative components of sexual satisfaction appraisals and as a result, important interpretive patterns may be overlooked.

  • McClelland, S. I. (2011) [pdf here]

    Federal policies that guide clinical trial design exert an often unseen influence in people’s lives. Taking a closer look at the US Food and Drug Administration’s guidance in the field of female sexual dysfunction, this paper examines how sexual satisfaction is increasingly used to guide clinical interventions; however, questions remain about the social psychological qualities of this appraisal. The current mixed methods study pairs interview data with close ended measures of sexual satisfaction in order to examine the cognitive and interpersonal strategies individuals used when they were asked to assess their own sexual satisfaction (N = 41). While researchers often assume that responses in self-report measures are reflections of an intra-individual reflective process, findings demonstrated that women and sexual minority men often reported on their partner’s sexual satisfaction instead of their own. Taking up the question of who is the “self” in self-reports of sexual satisfaction, this study explores the clinical, research, and policy implications of relying on sexual satisfaction as a meaningful indicator of change or well-being in an individual’s life.

  • McClelland, S. I. (2014) [pdf here]

    Intimate justice is a theoretical framework that links experiences of inequity in the sociopolitical domain with how individuals imagine and evaluate the quality of their sexual and relational experiences. Developed initially to guide research on sexual satisfaction (McClelland, 2010, 2011), intimate justice encourages researchers to question how social conditions, such as racial and gender-based stereotypes and sexual stigma, impact what individuals feel they deserve in their intimate lives. In addition to theorizing the impact of social conditions on deservingness, intimate justice encourages a critical engagement with research methods. Specifically, intimate justice argues that research on individuals’ evaluations of their lives – and specifically their levels of satisfaction, well-being, and happiness – should be assessed using measures and methods that always consider both potential group differences and the social conditions that may influence these appraisals.

  • McClelland, S. I., & Opotow, S. (2011) [pdf here]

    Building from Deutsch’s intellectual contribution to social justice, this chapter situates examples of recent justice scholarship within classical and contemporary theory and research. It takes the genealogy of academic mentorship and research seriously and positions four generations of justice scholarship in relationship to one another: Kurt Lewin’s work on the psychology of groups and social norms; Morton Deutsch’s work on conflict and justice; Susan Opotow’s work on the scope of justice and moral exclusion; and Sara McClelland’s work on evaluations of satisfaction in intimate relationships. Over the course of this chapter, we use justice concepts as a way to discuss how individuals are influenced by history, status, and power when they evaluate experiences of injustice in the private sphere. [Google Books]

  • McClelland, S. I. (2010) [pdf here]

    This article elaborates an intimate justice framework to help guide research on sexual satisfaction. Using a critical historiography approach, I examine the etiology and development of the psychological construct of “satisfaction” over the last century and argue that social and political antecedents to satisfaction ratings are an essential and under-theorized aspect of research in this field. By examining what are considered to be the most influential definitions in life satisfaction research, I identify conceptual gaps, oversights, and disagreements that characterize this body of work, and specifically its theoretical treatment of inequity. Moving to the intimate domain, I argue that the field of sexual satisfaction must include theories and methods that systematically consider the role of social and sexual stigmas as antecedents to sexual satisfaction ratings. In the conclusion, building from existing social justice theories, I propose an intimate justice framework as a means to guide research that can highlight issues of entitlement and deservingness in sexual satisfaction research. This is particularly important as sexual satisfaction is increasingly used as an indicator of individual and relational well-being; however, this construct is presently limited and inadequately measured for women and men who experience limited sexual rights in the socio-political domain because of their gender and/or sexual minority status.

Feminist Research Methods

In this line of work, we develop and work with a range of feminist methods which pair empirical procedures (such as interviews and surveys) with assessments of people's expectations and feelings of deservingness. Across many studies, we have found that individuals' expectations, often shaped by unequal political rights, play a central role in participants’ responses and should not be ignored by researchers.

  • McClelland, S. I., & Dutcher, H. (2024, 2016)

    2nd Edition, 2024 [pdf here]

    1st Edition, 2016 [pdf here]

    Heterosexist bias systematically limits what we know and imagine about the world as a result of conceptualizing human experience in strictly heterosexual terms. The term bias describes a prejudice against or an inclination toward some ideas or people over others, and as a result, bias creates prejudices within social structures, policies, and conventions. Heterosexism is a foundational system that oppresses non-heterosexually identified individuals. Heterosexism stems from the assumption that heterosexuality is natural, universal, and therefore inevitable. In turn, sexualities and identities such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) are assumed to be not natural, not universal, and/or not inevitable. As a result, heterosexism ignores, rejects, and stigmatizes non-heterosexual identities, behaviors, and relationships.

  • Davis T. M., Papp L. J., Baker M. R. & McClelland, S. I. (2023) [pdf here]

    Objectives: The present study examined the measurement invariance of the Symbolic Racism Scale (SRS) and the Modern Sexism Scale (MSS) across racial/ethnic and gender groups. Previous psychometric evaluations of the SRS and MSS scores have not examined the equivalence across racial/ethnic and gender groups or have been otherwise statistically inadequate. Therefore, this study sought to fill this gap. Method: To establish measurement equivalence across racial/ethnic (Black, Latinx, and white) and gender (women and men) groups, we conducted a measurement invariance analysis of the SRS and the MSS in a large, diverse sample (N = 719). Results: We found that the SRS and MSS were invariant across gender, and the SRS was invariant across racial/ethnic groups. However, the MSS was noninvariant across racial/ethnic groups. Partial invariance testing revealed nonequivalent factor loadings between Black and Latinx participants compared to white participants on an item of the MSS that referenced “unwarranted” attention that women receive from the government and media. Conclusions: Researchers should consider reevaluating the item that reads: “Over the past few years, the government and news media have been showing more concern about the treatment of women than is warranted by women’s actual experiences.” Future research is needed to assess how the item is interpreted by Black and Latinx people so it can be modified for use in these communities. Our findings underscore the importance of assessing the validity of the scores in commonly used scales across diverse groups.

  • McClelland, S. I., Dutcher, H., & Crawford, B. (2020) [pdf here]

    We investigated the content of survey items to assess whether and how racist and sexist stereotypes are woven into the fabric of research on attitudes about abortion in the United States. We collected and analyzed a comprehensive set of survey items (456 items from 80 studies) used in peer‐reviewed research published from 2008 to 2018 in representative and nonrepresentative studies of U.S. respondents. Our analysis was guided by historical narratives that have been influential in shaping representations of women and reproduction in the United States (e.g., the Moynihan Report). With this background, we developed three themes pertaining to how individuals’ attitudes about abortion are measured: we found that items rely on (1) moral, (2) sexual, and (3) financial evaluations of women seeking abortion care. These themes highlighted implicit and explicit judgments of women, including representations of them as unwilling to partner with men and as fiscally and sexually irresponsible. We argue that survey items meant to objectively assess abortion attitudes draw on negative racial and gender stereotypes and that these stereotypes then travel widely under the veneer of scientific objectivity. Critical methods, such as the item bank analysis described in this study, are crucial to discern how inequality, prejudice, and discrimination can be reproduced in the fabric of research methods. In our discussion, we offer suggestions for researchers to reduce these and related forms of bias in survey‐based abortion research.

  • McClelland, S. I. (2018) [pdf here]

    As social scientists studying adolescences and young adulthood are increasingly drawn to critical perspectives in their research, many still wonder how to proceed and what methods are available. The modifier of “critical,” as I use it here, signals a researcher’s commitment to accounting for and examining the role of inequality, even when it might be difficult to observe, has become normalized, or is disavowed by participants. In order to encourage readers to use critical methods in their work, I draw on four examples from my own research. I start with a discussion of the self-anchored ladder, a method that invests in meanings that participants bring to research and how these affect the scores they provide. Second, I discuss survey marginalia methods that invite participants into the research dynamic, thickening the already complicated definitions of “inside” and “outside” a survey design. Third, I discuss Q methods as a way to ask participants to show us their thoughts, creating a mosaic of associations that can be analyzed empirically as well as used as a way to invite complicated and messy lives into the research. Finally, I discuss interview analysis strategies, which focus on adaptation to injustice within the interview dynamic and present potential analytics frameworks to contend with cellophane as it appears in qualitative interviews.

  • Fahs, B., Swank, E., & McClelland, S. I. (2018) [pdf here]

    The study of women’s sexuality has been fraught with contradictions and conflict, yet it provides a fruitful mechanism to examine social inequalities, power relationships, cultural norms, social scripts, and values about gender and social identities. In the 30 years since Carole Vance (1983) posited that women grapple with the tension between pleasure and danger and face ambivalence about how to experience and express their sexuality, research on women’s sexuality has broadened the narratives about what sexuality means. As Vance (1993) wrote 10 years after the publication of Pleasure and Danger, “For women to experience autonomous desire and act in ways that give them sexual pleasure in a society that would nurture and protect their delights is at the same time our culture’s worst nightmare and feminism’s best fantasy” (p. 289). For feminist psychologists in particular, women’s sexuality, often framed by this pleasure and danger dialectic, has proven to be extraordinarily complicated (becoming all the more difficult to theorize, study, label, and understand) and full of possibilities (providing a lens to examine a whole host of social inequalities and personal experiences). In this chapter, we illustrate the paradox of pleasure and danger by examining points of tension, contradiction, and conflict about women’s sexuality, power, and empowerment.

  • McClelland, S. I. (2017) [pdf here]

    In research using self-report measures, there is little attention paid to how participants interpret concepts; instead, researchers often assume definitions are shared, universal, or easily understood. I discuss the self-anchored ladder, adapted from Cantril’s ladder, which is a procedure that simultaneously collects a participant’s self-reported rating and their interpretation of that rating.

    Drawing from a study about sexual satisfaction that included a self-anchored ladder, four analyses are presented and discussed in relation to one another: (1) comparisons of sexual satisfaction scores, (2) variations of structures participants applied to the ladder, (3) frequency of terms used to describe sexual satisfaction, and (4) thematic analysis of “best” and “worst” sexual satisfaction.

    These analytic strategies offer researchers a model for how to incorporate self-anchored ladder items into research designs as a means to draw out layers of meaning in quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods data. I argue that the ladder invites the potential for conceptual disruption by prioritizing skepticism in survey research and bringing greater attention to how social locations, histories, economic structures, and other factors shape self-report data. I also address issues related to the multiple epistemological positions that the ladder demands. Finally, I argue for the centrality of epistemological self-reflexivity in critical feminist psychological research.

  • McClelland, S. I. (2017) [pdf here]

    Feminist researchers have highlighted the increased hyper- and hetero-sexualization of breast cancer by drawing attention to the gendered dimensions of disease. In a set of interviews with women diagnosed with metastatic disease, I examined how participants labored to fulfill feminine gender and sexual ideals. Two themes were explored: gender labor, which included feeling fat and unattractive, and sexual labor, which included managing partners' sexual demands and sexual pain. This study builds on emergent feminist critiques that challenge expectations for a woman to be a “sexy cancer patient” and highlights how gender and sexual ideals continue to affect women negatively, even when they are extremely ill.

  • McClelland, S. I. (2017) [pdf here]

    In this paper, I reflect on an important and infrequently discussed aspect of qualitative research: listening. Listening is often imagined as easy. It is however, is a difficult skill that not only takes practice, but also comes with possibilities and challenges for a researcher. In an effort to develop and elaborate a practice of listening in a research context, I develop the idea of vulnerable listening and offer 3 scenarios from my own research. These include: (a) emotional dangers associated with listening, (b) the often unacknowledged role of the listener’s body, and (c) the role of extreme emotions in research, such as feeling outraged. Drawing on my own experiences interviewing women diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer, I highlight how researchers who collect data by listening might care for their own and others’ vulnerability. Toward this end, I outline several strategies for researchers looking to support and maintain a practice of vulnerable listening.

  • Frost, D. M., McClelland, S. I., & Dettmann, M. (2017) [pdf here]

    This study examined the impact of sexual closeness on sexual well-being. We developed a nuanced and multifaceted conceptualization of sexual closeness in the form of a constellation of ideal sexual closeness with a partner, actual sexual closeness, and the discrepancy between the two. Data were obtained from a diverse sample of N = 619 participants who took part in the Lives and Relationships Study: A longitudinal survey of men and women in relationships living in the U.S. and Canada. Increases in sexual closeness discrepancies over a period of 1 year predicted concomitant decreases in two indicators of sexual well-being: sexual satisfaction and orgasm frequency evaluations. Decreases in sexual closeness discrepancies resulted in improvement in sexual well-being. Individuals who reported no sexual closeness discrepancies and experienced no changes in sexual closeness discrepancies tended to have the highest levels of sexual well-being. Importantly, sexual closeness discrepancies were robust predictors of sexual well-being, above and beyond individuals’ actual sexual closeness, general relationship closeness, and other demographic and relationship characteristics known to be associated with sexual well-being. The present findings demonstrate that how close people feel sexually to their relationship partners is part of a general constellation of factors related to relationship closeness that, only when considered together, sufficiently explain the ways in which experiences of closeness impact sexual well-being in romantic relationships.

  • Fahs, B., Plante, R., & McClelland, S. I. (2017) [pdf here]

    For those entering the field of sexuality studies, there is often little advice or guidance on the many facets of the work, some of which are pleasurable and some of which are dangerous. Drawing from our personal and professional conflicts surrounding our work as feminist psychologists and sociologists studying women’s sexuality, we extend Carole Vance’s (1984) claims about pleasure and danger by arguing that, for the sex researcher, pleasure and danger are in fact inverted. That which should give us pleasure (e.g. having our work promoted to the public; teaching critical material about sexuality; thinking deeply about our personal relationships) ends up feeling dangerous, and that which should feel dangerous (e.g. saying and doing and working on taboo things; calling out homophobia, racism, classism, and sexism) ends up giving us pleasure. We examine several areas where we experience personal and professional costs and benefits of doing feminist sex research, including relationships with partners, communication with research participants, pedagogical challenges and conflicts, the interface between the sex-researcher identity and university/institutional practices, and, finally, our interface with the public world and the mass media. In doing so, we aim to use our personal experiences to highlight just a few of the areas that emerging sexuality researchers may encounter. In addition, we extend Vance’s framework of pleasure and danger beyond the experiences of women having sex and into the realm of those seeking to understand, research, write about, theorize, and assess the complicated terrain of women’s sexuality.

  • McClelland, S. I., Rubin, J. D., & Bauermeister, J. A. (2016) [pdf here]

    A podcast conversation with McClelland and editor of PWQ is available here

    In this study, we link together moments of discrimination described by young bisexual women. We do so in order to theorize about associations between negative stereotypes heard early in one’s life and later minimization of personal discrimination. Using interviews with 13 young women, we sought to understand the types of negative messages participants heard about “bi/sexuality” as well as the ways that they perceived or did not perceive themselves as having experienced discrimination related to their sexuality.

    We found that family members and friends often described participants’ bisexuality as “disgusting,” “difficult to understand,” or “hot,” and participants described their own experiences with discrimination as “no big deal.” We use this analysis to build on previous research concerning microaggressions, sexual stigma, and denial of discrimination to discuss how familial, social, and political environments create a set of conditions in which later injustices are imagined as normative and inevitable.

    Finally, we discuss the methodological dilemmas facing feminist psychologists who aim to analyze discrimination and the challenges in documenting individuals’ experiences of stigma, which may be imagined as no big deal to individuals, but are in fact unjust. It is imperative to develop strategies to recognize, document, and critically assess how injustice becomes all too normal for some and the role that feminist psychology can play in changing this.

  • McClelland, S. I. (2016) [pdf here]

    Marginalia is a term used to describe written notes or verbal comments spontaneously offered by participants over the course of a study. Although typically ignored, this unexpected form of data offers psychologists an opportunity to listen when participants “speak back” to the researcher. In this introduction to this special section on marginalia in Qualitative Psychology, I argue for recognizing marginalia as data. In addition, I discuss relevant research on marginalia in the social sciences and describe evidence for how marginalia offer an invaluable tool for researchers to examine their own assumptions about research design and data collection. The authors included in this special section describe their experiences with analyzing marginalia in studies using survey, interview, and participatory research methods. Each article discusses challenges the authors faced when thinking about marginalia. This involved shifting from thinking about marginalia as “noise” to thinking about marginalia as an important source of data. This special section on marginalia offers strategies that extend calls from feminist writers of color to recognize the margins as locations of political knowledge, a challenge to status quo assumptions, and critical spaces for knowledge production.

  • McClelland, S. I., & Holland, K. J. (2016) [pdf here]

    Comments left by participants in the margins of a survey are commonly ignored during data analysis. Rather than overlook these marginalia, we describe a qualitative analysis of the notes, underlines, and cross-outs left by participants in the margins of the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI; Rosen et al., 2000). Participants who were diagnosed with late stage breast cancer had taken the FSFI as part of a larger multi-method quality of life study. In our analysis, we identify 3 categories to analyze the 136 instances of marginalia left next to FSFI items: clarifications, corrections, and noting items as “not applicable.” Using these marginalia as guidance, we developed a modified scoring procedure for the FSFI that accounted for those participants who marked items as “not applicable” in their marginalia but would have been dropped from analysis due to missing data. We offer guidelines for researchers interested in analyzing marginalia as a means to incorporate and amplify participant feedback in survey research design. This is especially important when even well-validated instruments are used to make, for example, clinical diagnoses and treatment decisions, but do not adequately account for participants’ lives. Studies of marginalia enable qualitatively derived insights to be effectively incorporated into survey methodology, enabling us to better attend to the ways participants communicate and share their lives with us over the course of any study.

  • Fahs, B., & McClelland, S. I. (2016) [pdf here]

    Attentive to the collision of sex and power, we add momentum to the ongoing development of the subfield of critical sexuality studies. We argue that this body of work is defined by its critical orientation toward the study of sexuality, along with a clear allegiance to critical modalities of thought, particularly feminist thought. Critical sexuality studies takes its cues from several other critical moments in related fields, including critical psychology, critical race theory, critical public health, and critical youth studies. Across these varied critical stances is a shared investment in examining how power and privilege operate, understanding the role of historical and epistemological violence in research, and generating new models and paradigms to guide empirical and theoretical research. With this guiding framework, we propose three central characteristics of critical sexuality studies: (a) conceptual analysis, with particular attention to how we define key terms and conceptually organize our research (e.g., attraction, sexually active, consent, agency, embodiment, sexual subjectivity); (b) attention to the material qualities of abject bodies, particularly bodies that are ignored, overlooked, or pushed out of bounds (e.g., viscous bodies, fat bodies, bodies in pain); and (c) heteronormativity and heterosexual privilege, particularly how assumptions about heterosexuality and heteronormativity circulate in sexuality research. Through these three critical practices, we argue that critical sexuality studies showcases how sex and power collide and recognizes (and tries to subvert) the various power imbalances that are deployed and replicated in sex research.

  • McClelland, S. I., & Holland, K. J. (2015) [pdf here]

    We examined how university leaders described what and who needed to change in order to increase the representation of female faculty in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) departments. Thirty-one (28 men and 3 women) STEM departmental chairs and deans at a large, public university participated in semi-structured interviews. Data were examined using both qualitative and quantitative procedures. Analysis focused on participants’ descriptions of responsibility for changes related to gender equity. Using the distinction of high versus low responsibility, themes were examined for their qualitative characteristics as well as their frequency. Leaders who exhibited high personal responsibility most frequently saw themselves as needing to change and also named their male colleagues as concurrently responsible for diversity. Conversely, leaders who exhibited low personal responsibility most frequently described female faculty as responsible and described women’s attitudes and their “choice” to have a family as obstacles to gender diversity in STEM. We argue that the dimensions of high and low responsibility are useful additions to discussions of leadership, workplace diversity initiatives, and gender equity more broadly. To this end, we provide several methodological tools to examine these subtle, yet essential, aspects of how diversity and change efforts are imagined and discussed.

  • McClelland, S. I. (2014) [pdf here]

    Virtual special issue on "Constructing Sexualities in Feminism & Psychology can be found here

    Not enough is understood about the role of gender norms and sexual stigma in shaping individuals’ definitions of sexual satisfaction. The current study aimed to investigate the heterogeneity of definitions of sexual satisfaction in a sample of young adults, ages 18–28 (M = 22.6; SD = 4.78). Forty US participants (50% females; 45% LGBTQ; 53% white) sorted 63 statements about sexual satisfaction using a Q methodology design (Watts and Stenner, 2005), followed by semi-structured interviews. This mixed methods procedure enabled both a systematic and in-depth examination of the dimensions participants prioritized when determining their sexual satisfaction. Analysis of participants’ Q sorts indicated four distinct perspectives on sexual satisfaction: emotional and masculine; relational and feminine; partner focused; and orgasm focused. These four factors were further explored using participants’ interview data. Findings indicated that individuals interpreted sexual satisfaction using several key dimensions not regularly included in survey research. Existing survey items do not regularly attend to the gendered and heteronormative components of sexual satisfaction appraisals and as a result, important interpretive patterns may be overlooked.

  • Frost, D. M., McClelland, S. I., Clark, J. B., & Boylan, E. A. (2014) [pdf here]

    In this chapter, we review issues central to the use of phenomenological research methods in the psychological study of sexuality. Phenomenological methods are characterized by close attention to the details of participants’ lived experience as well as an emphasis on participants’ interpretation of their experience. This group of methods is essential in psychological research on sexuality because it helps researchers to understand the phenomenon of sexuality as it is experienced in everyday life and under constant change. Beginning with a summary of the epistemological foundations of phenomenological research methods in psychology, we present an overview of several popular approaches to data collection and analysis that facilitate phenomenological investigations of sexuality. Classical foundations, future directions, limitations, advantages, and clinical and policy relevance are discussed via key exemplar studies of sexuality related phenomena using phenomenological research methods.

  • McClelland, S. I. (2012) [pdf here]

    Over the past 20 years, sexual quality of life has become of increasing interest to psychologists studying quality of life with ill and/or aging populations. As people are living longer with chronic illnesses, the maintenance of sexual health has become a topic of concern and an essential domain of overall quality of life (QoL; see Arrington, Cofrancesco, & Wu, 2004). This emerging body of research has undoubtedly helped to guide clinical interventions and to increase quality of life for patients and their intimate partners. However, questions remain as to whether definitions and operationalizations of sexual function commonly used in research settings are sufficient to describe the range and scope of sexual quality of life (SQoL) experienced by both men and women, especially those who are ill, recovering from illness, or living with a chronic illness. This chapter offers 10 suggestions to help guide researchers in this burgeoning area of study. The recommendations include measurement as well as research design considerations in order to help enrich researchers’ understanding of the psychological qualities of sexual quality of life as experienced across diverse populations who are coping with aging and/or conditions of illness, and perhaps treatment. [Google Books]

  • McClelland, S. I. (2011) [pdf here]

    ederal policies that guide clinical trial design exert an often unseen influence in people’s lives. Taking a closer look at the US Food and Drug Administration’s guidance in the field of female sexual dysfunction, this paper examines how sexual satisfaction is increasingly used to guide clinical interventions; however, questions remain about the social psychological qualities of this appraisal. The current mixed methods study pairs interview data with close ended measures of sexual satisfaction in order to examine the cognitive and interpersonal strategies individuals used when they were asked to assess their own sexual satisfaction ( N = 41). While researchers often assume that responses in self-report measures are reflections of an intra-individual reflective process, findings demonstrated that women and sexual minority men often reported on their partner’s sexual satisfaction instead of their own. Taking up the question of who is the “self” in self-reports of sexual satisfaction, this study explores the clinical, research, and policy implications of relying on sexual satisfaction as a meaningful indicator of change or well-being in an individual’s life.

  • McClelland, S. I., & Fine, M. (2008) [pdf here]

    In this essay, we theorize methods to study teen women’s sexual desires. Our title stems from a concern that young women’s desires come to be laminated in cellophane. We see layers of cellophane being produced by: a market economy that rushes to commodify young female bodies; sociopolitical, moral, and hetero-normative panics that obsess over young women’s sexualities; racist imagery and institutional practices that vilify the sexualities of women of color; and by schools increasingly kidnapped by the policy of teaching Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage curricula in place of serious sexuality education (see Fine & McClelland, 2006; 2007). In this essay, we are particularly interested in methods to study sexual desires as they are narrated, embodied, and enacted by young women in this political context. Wrapped in a kind of collective discursive cellophane, we believe it may difficult for them to speak as their tongues are weighed down with dominant assumptions and panics, and similarly, our ears may be clogged with our own dominant [feminist] discourses for their desires. In this essay, we ask: How can critical feminist theories and methods account for the layers of discursive cellophane that instruct young women to be ashamed, guilty, provocative, hot, dissociated and/or regretful about their sexualities? How do we craft methods that acknowledge these political and discursive contexts – including the varied (yet limited) positions available to and imposed upon young women – and still manage to understand something about what it means to be a young woman living and developing sexually in the early decades of the 21st century?

  • McClelland, S. I., & Fine, M. (2008) [pdf here]

    Since 1982, more than US $1 billion have been spent through federally sponsored abstinence-only-until-marriage (AOUM) programs, including nearly $800 million between 2001 and 2006, during the presidency of George W. Bush. With this increased funding has come pressure to evaluate the impact of AOUM programs. In 1998, a federally funded evaluation of AOUM programming was commissioned to assess its impact on young people. Because the abstinence policies and the evaluation of their success derive from the federal government, the authors identify the troubling potential of "embedded science." Using a recent example of research in the field of abstinence-only education (Maynard et al., 2005), the authors identify a number of practices and consequences of embedding research science within existing public policy. They find that when evaluation research is overly embedded, it tends to be dominated by political ideologies, information is omitted, and critique is virtually absent.

Adolescence, Gender & Sexuality Development

This line of research with young adults focuses on the early development of intimate imaginations. This research has included what and how young people learn what is “satisfying,” a focus on young LGBTQ-identified women, and studies about how public policies shape people's sense of worth and feelings of deservingness.

 
  • Dutcher, H., & McClelland, S. I. (2019) [pdf here]

    Definitions of "safe sex" often focus on the use of condoms and contraception, but largely ignore other dimensions of safety, such as efforts to feel emotionally or physically safe. These gaps in the definition of the term safety demand greater attention to how being safe and feeling safe are interpreted by individuals who live and engage in sexual lives marked by social and political inequality. In the current study, we draw on interviews with 17 young women ages 18–28 from a U.S. urban university to examine efforts they used to protect themselves in sexual relationships. When having sex with men, we found young women relied on a range of efforts to keep themselves safe, such as controlling their own sexual desire, developing strict contraceptive regimens, and building relational contexts characterized by physical and emotional safety. We argue that sexual safety labor (i.e., "good" contraceptive behavior, "waiting" to have sex, and "careful" decision-making) offers evidence of what safe sex requires of young women. We examine this range of cognitions and behaviors as forms of labor directed at making sex feel and be safe; however, young women did not describe these efforts in terms of their own time or energy. In our analysis, we suggest that vigilance in sexual relationships has become part of young women’s required repertoire of safe sex behaviors, but largely goes unnoticed by them. We connect these findings with public health campaigns that teach young people about safety and offer alternatives for researchers looking to understand and study what is imagined as "safe sex.”

  • McClelland, S. I. (2018) [pdf here]

    As social scientists studying adolescences and young adulthood are increasingly drawn to critical perspectives in their research, many still wonder how to proceed and what methods are available. The modifier of “critical,” as I use it here, signals a researcher’s commitment to accounting for and examining the role of inequality, even when it might be difficult to observe, has become normalized, or is disavowed by participants. In order to encourage readers to use critical methods in their work, I draw on four examples from my own research. I start with a discussion of the self-anchored ladder, a method that invests in meanings that participants bring to research and how these affect the scores they provide. Second, I discuss survey marginalia methods that invite participants into the research dynamic, thickening the already complicated definitions of “inside” and “outside” a survey design. Third, I discuss Q methods as a way to ask participants to show us their thoughts, creating a mosaic of associations that can be analyzed empirically as well as used as a way to invite complicated and messy lives into the research. Finally, I discuss interview analysis strategies, which focus on adaptation to injustice within the interview dynamic and present potential analytics frameworks to contend with cellophane as it appears in qualitative interviews.

  • Bell, S. N., & McClelland, S. I. (2017) [pdf here]

    While cultural ideas about "healthy" and "fulfilling" sexuality often include orgasm, many young women do not experience orgasm during partnered sex. The current study examined how women described this absence of orgasm in their sexual experiences with male partners. We examined interviews (N = 17) with women ages 18 to 28 and focused on their ideas about orgasm and their explanations concerning when and why they do not orgasm. We explored three themes that illustrate the strategies young women use to contend with orgasmic absence: (1) What's the big deal?; (2) It's just biology; and (3) Not now, but someday. We found that young women's explanations allowed them to reduce feelings of abnormality and enabled them to distance themselves from sexual expectations regarding the perceived value of orgasm. In analyzing the complicated gender and sexual dynamics surrounding orgasm, we turned to Fahs' (2014) work on sexual freedom and the importance of articulating freedom from sexual obligations as a key intervention in critical sexuality research. In our discussion, we examine the implications of our findings for critical researchers looking to better understand the role of sexual norms in how young women imagine and discuss the role of pleasure in their own sexual lives.

  • McClelland, S. I., & Fine, M. (2017) [pdf here]

    The chapters in this section pierce the cellophane of cultural anxieties about young sexualities, always gendered and racialized, always imagined as desiring and dangerous, (dis)abled and excessive (McClelland and Fine 2008a, b). On the naughty/innocent axis, many of the authors help us see how young children are engaging always, already, and riskily with/in their bodies even as adults insist on their innocence; how black girls and women are taking up, resisting, and queering the tropes that are layered onto their cultural forms; how immigrant and undocumented young people refuse the yardsticks of who deserves citizenship, belonging, who measures up; and we accompany activist social movements as they press with intensity at the borders of bodies, media, and schools, even as governmentality stitches together the lips of educators, conscripting what can and cannot be taught.

  • McClelland, S. I., Rubin, J. D., & Bauermeister, J. A. (2016) [pdf here]

    In this study, we link together moments of discrimination described by young bisexual women. We do so in order to theorize about associations between negative stereotypes heard early in one’s life and later minimization of personal discrimination. Using interviews with 13 young women, we sought to understand the types of negative messages participants heard about “bi/sexuality” as well as the ways that they perceived or did not perceive themselves as having experienced discrimination related to their sexuality.

    We found that family members and friends often described participants’ bisexuality as “disgusting,” “difficult to understand,” or “hot,” and participants described their own experiences with discrimination as “no big deal.” We use this analysis to build on previous research concerning microaggressions, sexual stigma, and denial of discrimination to discuss how familial, social, and political environments create a set of conditions in which later injustices are imagined as normative and inevitable.

    Finally, we discuss the methodological dilemmas facing feminist psychologists who aim to analyze discrimination and the challenges in documenting individuals’ experiences of stigma, which may be imagined as no big deal to individuals, but are in fact unjust. It is imperative to develop strategies to recognize, document, and critically assess how injustice becomes all too normal for some and the role that feminist psychology can play in changing this.

  • McClelland, S. I., Rubin, J. D., & Bauermeister, J. A. (2016) [pdf here]

    There is little research on what is meant by the concept of “feeling attracted” and even less about what same-sex attraction looks and feels like for individuals. Without insight into the phenomenon of same-sex attraction, researchers risk misunderstanding the role of sexual attraction in sexual identity development and risk mis-categorizing individuals in research designs that compare LGBTQ and heterosexual samples. The current study draws from semi-structured interviews (n = 30) with young lesbian-, bisexual-, and queer-identified women (ages 18–24) about their initial memories of same-sex attraction. Two questions were pursued using qualitative analytic strategies. We examined the age that participants remembered first experiencing same-sex attraction using content analysis. Two age groups emerged as distinct: those with experiences of same-sex attraction in childhood and those with initial attractions in later adolescence. We also examined key elements in participants’ descriptions of early same-sex attraction using thematic analysis. The role of embodied feelings, relationships with other young women, and social environments including media images emerged as central to initial experiences of attraction. Findings highlight how early experiences of same-sex attraction produced different types of interpretations within individuals and, in turn, these interpretations informed how participants did or did not take up LGBTQ identity labels. These findings may help guide the development of more refined measurement tools for researchers hoping to sample sexual minorities and can contribute to developing more effective supports for individuals who experience same-sex attraction but may not adopt LGBTQ identity labels and, as a result, are routinely missed in outreach efforts.

  • Rubin, J. D., & McClelland, S. I. (2015) [pdf here]

    Facebook offers a socialisation context in which young people from ethnic, gender and sexual minorities must continually manage the potential for prejudice and discrimination in the form of homophobia and racism. In-depth interviews were conducted with eight young women, aged 16–19 years, who self-identified as queer and as women of colour. A detailed analysis of these interviews – focusing in particular on how young people described navigating expectations of rejection from family and friends – offered insight into the psychological and health consequences associated with managing sexual identity(s) while online. The ‘closet’ ultimately takes on new meaning in this virtual space: participants described trying to develop social relationships within Facebook, which demands sharing one's thoughts, behaviours and ideas, while also hiding and silencing their emerging sexuality. In this ‘virtual closet’, tempering self presentation to offset social exclusion has become a continuous, yet personally treacherous, activity during the daily practice of using Facebook.

  • McClelland, S. I. (2014) [pdf here]

    Not enough is understood about the role of gender norms and sexual stigma in shaping individuals’ definitions of sexual satisfaction. The current study aimed to investigate the heterogeneity of definitions of sexual satisfaction in a sample of young adults, ages 18–28 (M = 22.6; SD = 4.78). Forty US participants (50% females; 45% LGBTQ; 53% white) sorted 63 statements about sexual satisfaction using a Q methodology design (Watts and Stenner, 2005), followed by semi-structured interviews. This mixed methods procedure enabled both a systematic and in-depth examination of the dimensions participants prioritized when determining their sexual satisfaction. Analysis of participants’ Q sorts indicated four distinct perspectives on sexual satisfaction: emotional and masculine; relational and feminine; partner focused; and orgasm focused. These four factors were further explored using participants’ interview data. Findings indicated that individuals interpreted sexual satisfaction using several key dimensions not regularly included in survey research. Existing survey items do not regularly attend to the gendered and heteronormative components of sexual satisfaction appraisals and as a result, important interpretive patterns may be overlooked.

  • McClelland, S. I., & Fine, M. (2014) [pdf here]

    In this chapter, we extend our earlier work on sexuality education in U.S. public schools in which we forwarded a theory of adolescent sexuality, which we called thick desire (Fine & McClelland, 2006). We chose the metaphor of thickness in order to evoke the multi-faceted ‘nature’ of sexual desire and to underline our reading of desire as a product of intimate and social negotiations. In contrast to contemporary theories that frame sexual desire as emerging solely from individual motivation, behaviour, or fantasy (within the person or the couple; see Basson 2000, 2001; Brotto, Bitzer, Laan, Leiblum, & Luria, 2010; Carvalho & Nobre, 2010; cf., Kaschak & Tiefer, 2001), thick desire invites a theoretical and methodological intervention. It reminds us that bodies adhere with connective tissue to economic, political, historic, and psychological landscapes—meaning that desire never stands on its own. It is a concept we placed into feminist discourse to signal how bodies are linked to social arrangements, politics, yearnings, deprivations, and betrayals in public settings and that these connections— both supportive and restrictive—inform how young people learn to develop a sense of desire. Thick desire encourages researchers and policy makers alike to situate desire as an ‘entry point’ (McClelland & Frost, 2014), a window through which we might begin to notice the extensive web of factors in a person’s life, family, community, and nation when making evaluations and recommendations about how individuals can and should learn about, practice, and engage with sexuality.

  • McClelland, S. I., & Tolman, D. L. (2014) [pdf here]

    The field of adolescent sexuality has often been marked by debates about how much, at what age, and with what restrictions young people should learn about and engage in sexual activity. Research in the area of adolescent sexuality has aimed, in large part, to explain the prevalence, outcomes, contexts, and predictors of sexual activity in teens. Focus has often been on sexual risk and heterosexual intercourse, specifically the age of first intercourse, rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), unintended pregnancy, as well as other associated behaviors such as alcohol and drug use (Zimmer-Gembeck & Helfand, 2008). Over the last 30 years, however, there has been a increasing interest in examining sexuality as a normative developmental experience which includes not only questions regarding sexual activity but further elaboration of girls’ and boys’ sexuality – including gender and sexual identity development, body image, how sexuality is experienced, how it is negotiated with peers and partners, and the development of expectations that a sexual life can be a balance of both pleasure and risk (Tolman & McClelland, 2011).

  • McClelland, S. I., & Hunter, L. E. (2013) [pdf here]

    In this essay we examine one rhetorical mechanism often used to determine threat in the public sphere – the category of “age appropriate.” The term “age appropriate sexuality” constrains how and when bodies are able to be sexual, and conversely, when bodies are considered “out of line.” Age appropriate sexuality demonstrates how certain bodies, and often young female African American bodies, are the sites of emergent threat and thereby, often sites of moral panic. While the phrase “age appropriate” is most recognized for its role in discussions of children, we expand this discussion to examine how messages about appropriate norms of sexual expression travel with women late into life. Using interview material from a study with women at the end of life, we forward a critique of the term “age appropriate sexuality” for its potential to constrict sexual expression for women of all ages.

  • Johns, M. M., Pingle, E. S., Youatt, E. J., Soler, J. H., McClelland, S. I., & Bauermeister, J. A. (2013) [pdf here]

    Smoking rates among young sexual minority women (YSMW) are disproportionately high as compared to heterosexual populations. While this disparity has commonly been attributed to the sexual minority stress process, little empirical work has explored what may protect YSMW from high rates of smoking. Using data (N = 471) from a cross-sectional study designed to investigate YSMW’s (age 18–24) smoking behaviors and correlates; we explore the relationship of LGBT community connections, YSMW’s social network characteristics, and stress to smoking behaviors (i.e., status, frequency, amount). Through this analysis, we find support for LGBT community connection as well as friendships with other sexual minorities as protective in relation to YSMW’s smoking behaviors. We discuss the implications of our results, highlighting the need for future longitudinal research and interventions designed to bolster YSMW’s connections to the LGBT community and their social networks.

  • McClelland, S. I. (2011) [pdf here]

    Federal policies that guide clinical trial design exert an often unseen influence in people’s lives. Taking a closer look at the US Food and Drug Administration’s guidance in the field of female sexual dysfunction, this paper examines how sexual satisfaction is increasingly used to guide clinical interventions; however, questions remain about the social psychological qualities of this appraisal. The current mixed methods study pairs interview data with close ended measures of sexual satisfaction in order to examine the cognitive and interpersonal strategies individuals used when they were asked to assess their own sexual satisfaction ( N = 41). While researchers often assume that responses in self-report measures are reflections of an intra-individual reflective process, findings demonstrated that women and sexual minority men often reported on their partner’s sexual satisfaction instead of their own. Taking up the question of who is the “self” in self-reports of sexual satisfaction, this study explores the clinical, research, and policy implications of relying on sexual satisfaction as a meaningful indicator of change or well-being in an individual’s life.

  • Tolman, D. L., & McClelland, S. I. (2011) [pdf here]

    This review details a key innovation across the field of adolescent sexuality research over the last decade—conceptualizing sexuality as a normative aspect of adolescent development. Anchored in a growing articulation of adolescent sexuality as having positive qualities and consequences, we provide an organizing framework for understanding sexuality as normative and developmentally expected. Using this framework, we report on 3 specific areas of research that have developed “critical mass” over the past decade: new views on sexual behavior, sexual selfhood, and sexual socialization in the 21st century. We conclude by suggesting that the next step in the field of adolescent sexuality development is the explicit integration of “positive” dimensions of sexuality with risk management dimensions. Rather than navigating a binary between positive and risky, we propose characterizing the “both/and” quality of adolescent sexuality development as normative . This framework, we argue, encourages empirical research that assumes a wide range of strategies through which adolescents learn about themselves, their bodies, intimate partners, and relationships within contexts where they are required to both manage risks and develop positive patterns for adulthood sexuality. We conclude with considerations for future research and public policy.

  • McClelland, S. I., & Fine, M. (2008) [pdf here]

    In this essay, we theorize methods to study teen women’s sexual desires. Our title stems from a concern that young women’s desires come to be laminated in cellophane. We see layers of cellophane being produced by: a market economy that rushes to commodify young female bodies; sociopolitical, moral, and hetero-normative panics that obsess over young women’s sexualities; racist imagery and institutional practices that vilify the sexualities of women of color; and by schools increasingly kidnapped by the policy of teaching Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage curricula in place of serious sexuality education (see Fine & McClelland, 2006; 2007). In this essay, we are particularly interested in methods to study sexual desires as they are narrated, embodied, and enacted by young women in this political context. Wrapped in a kind of collective discursive cellophane, we believe it may difficult for them to speak as their tongues are weighed down with dominant assumptions and panics, and similarly, our ears may be clogged with our own dominant [feminist] discourses for their desires. In this essay, we ask: How can critical feminist theories and methods account for the layers of discursive cellophane that instruct young women to be ashamed, guilty, provocative, hot, dissociated and/or regretful about their sexualities? How do we craft methods that acknowledge these political and discursive contexts – including the varied (yet limited) positions available to and imposed upon young women – and still manage to understand something about what it means to be a young woman living and developing sexually in the early decades of the 21st century?

  • McClelland, S. I., & Fine, M. (2008) [pdf here]

    Since 1982, more than US $1 billion have been spent through federally sponsored abstinence-only-until-marriage (AOUM) programs, including nearly $800 million between 2001 and 2006, during the presidency of George W. Bush. With this increased funding has come pressure to evaluate the impact of AOUM programs. In 1998, a federally funded evaluation of AOUM programming was commissioned to assess its impact on young people. Because the abstinence policies and the evaluation of their success derive from the federal government, the authors identify the troubling potential of "embedded science." Using a recent example of research in the field of abstinence-only education (Maynard et al., 2005), the authors identify a number of practices and consequences of embedding research science within existing public policy. They find that when evaluation research is overly embedded, it tends to be dominated by political ideologies, information is omitted, and critique is virtually absent.

  • McClelland, S. I., & Fine, M. (2008) [pdf here]

    The documentation of the empty spaces where desire should be spoken by young women has been valuable work; it has established the landscape of adolescent sexuality as an important and uneven terrain – a space where resources, education, and communication can have enormous impacts (see Fine 1988; Rasmussen 2006; Rose 2003; Snitow, Stansell and Thompson 1983; Thompson 1990; Tolman 1994, 2002, 2006). In this essay, we try to inch forward out of silent spaces, and instead, enter into the hidden transcripts of desire (borrowing from James Scott 1990), eavesdropping into the corners where young women wonder, speak about, try on, and reflect on questions of desire. We seek to understand the release points where snippets of young women’s desire can be heard in the culture and to reveal that which is designed to limit and encase such talk within discourses of (im)morality, protection, or victimization.

  • McClelland, S. I. (2008) [pdf here]

    In my classes, I am often looking for ways to teach undergraduates about adolescent sexual development and the antecedents of contemporary sexual attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes. I was pleased, therefore, to see that Carolyn Cocca, editor of the volume Adolescent Sexuality: A Historical Handbook and Guide, had collected a good deal of useful theory and research in the field of adolescent sexuality, focusing particularly on how adults historically have constricted the right of young people to develop sexually.

  • Fine, M., & McClelland, S. I. (2007) [pdf here]

    In this Article, we argue that contemporary public policies on adolescent sexuality are being designed in ways that (1) significantly limit young women’s access to information and health care regarding sexual behaviors and sexual desire; (2) diminish the supports available to young women, including those who have experienced sexual violence, risk, and/or danger; (3) limit the professional license of educators and health workers who typically support teens in their sexual and reproductive decision making; and (4) circumscribe the options available to young women who experience sexual desire or sexual violence in the name of protecting the young. We analyze how certain groups of already marginalized young women, such as young women of color, those with disabilities, lesbians, and young women in poverty, suffer more severely as the public sphere shifts away from offering support and instead toward punishment for sexual activity. To investigate our thesis, we analyze three specific public policies: (1) the federally funded proliferation of abstinence-only-until-marriage education in schools and communities; (2) the refusal to grant young women over-the-counter access to emergency contraception, and (3) requirements of parental consent or notification for an abortion. In this Article we include a brief history of each policy, the current implementation of the policy, and the consequences of each policy for women under eighteen, with particular attention to how these consequences are unequally distributed among young women based on their race or class or both.

  • Fine, M., & McClelland, S. I. (2006) [pdf here]

    Nearly twenty years after the publication of Michelle Fine's essay "Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire," the question of how sexuality education influences the development and health of adolescents remains just as relevant as it was in 1988. In this article, Michelle Fine and Sara McClelland examine the federal promotion of curricula advocating abstinence only until marriage in public schools and, in particular, how these policies constrict the development of "thick desire" in young women. Their findings highlight the fact that national policies have an uneven impact on young people and disproportionately place the burden on girls, youth of color, teens with disabilities, and lesbian/gay/bisexual/ transgender youth. With these findings in mind, the authors provide a set of research guidelines to encourage researchers, policymakers, and advocates as they collect data on, develop curricula for, and change the contexts in which young people are educated about sexuality and health.

Conceptual Analysis

 

In interdisciplinary research, there is often too little attention to what happens when concepts travel, what meanings they take up and lose. Across this line of research is an investment in examining how power and privilege operate, as well as understanding the role of historical and epistemological violence in research.

  • Higgins, J. A., & McClelland, S. I. (2023) [pdf here]

    The concept of ‘erotic equity’ can help fill in some of the gaps regarding sexual flourishing and social inequalities. Our use of the term ‘flourishing’ is indebted to earlier articulations of the conditions necessary for a human to thrive developed by Nussbaum and Sen (1993). Their work set the stage for understanding the crucial roles that poverty and uneven resource distribution play in disrupting and impeding flourishing. Building from this work, we define erotic equity as people’s access to sexual pleasure and well-being, including how social systems or structures enable or constrain these positive sexual experiences (Higgins, Lands, et al. 2022). As a result of societal inequalities and structural power imbalances, individuals have unequal access to sexual pleasure and well-being. Erotic inequities are patterned by multiple axes of inequality, including those linked to gender and sexual identity. For example, gender identity can facilitate, or fail to facilitate, positive aspects of sexuality. Research on the orgasm gap reveals that in heterosexual relationships, people with penises are much more likely to have orgasms than people with clitorises, despite similar abilities to achieve orgasm while masturbating (Mahar et al. 2020). Discrimination such as homophobia and transphobia also undermine sexual flourishing by limiting the sexual and relational imaginations of all individuals and threatening to punish those who imagine more capacious gender and/or sexual lives. In addition to considering social and structural power imbalances such as gender and sexual identity, researchers have also examined how social institutions from schools to organised religion influence sexual well-being.

  • Davis T. M., Papp L. J., Baker M. R. & McClelland, S. I. (2023) [pdf here]

    Objectives: The present study examined the measurement invariance of the Symbolic Racism Scale (SRS) and the Modern Sexism Scale (MSS) across racial/ethnic and gender groups. Previous psychometric evaluations of the SRS and MSS scores have not examined the equivalence across racial/ethnic and gender groups or have been otherwise statistically inadequate. Therefore, this study sought to fill this gap. Method: To establish measurement equivalence across racial/ethnic (Black, Latinx, and white) and gender (women and men) groups, we conducted a measurement invariance analysis of the SRS and the MSS in a large, diverse sample (N = 719). Results: We found that the SRS and MSS were invariant across gender, and the SRS was invariant across racial/ethnic groups. However, the MSS was noninvariant across racial/ethnic groups. Partial invariance testing revealed nonequivalent factor loadings between Black and Latinx participants compared to white participants on an item of the MSS that referenced “unwarranted” attention that women receive from the government and media. Conclusions: Researchers should consider reevaluating the item that reads: “Over the past few years, the government and news media have been showing more concern about the treatment of women than is warranted by women’s actual experiences.” Future research is needed to assess how the item is interpreted by Black and Latinx people so it can be modified for use in these communities. Our findings underscore the importance of assessing the validity of the scores in commonly used scales across diverse groups.

  • Higgins, J. A., Lands, M., Ufot, M., & McClelland, S. I. (2022) [pdf here]

    Sexual health includes positive aspects of sexuality and the possibility of having pleasurable sexual experiences. However, few researchers examine how socioeconomic conditions shape sexual wellbeing. This paper presents the concept of “erotic equity,” which refers to how social and structural systems enable, or fail to enable, positive aspects of sexuality. In part one, we use this concept to consider potential pathways through which socioeconomic conditions, especially poverty, may shape sexuality. Part two builds from this theoretical framework to review the empirical literature that documents associations between socioeconomics and sexual wellbeing. This narrative review process located 47 studies from more than 22 countries. Forty-four studies indicated that individuals who reported more constrained socioeconomic conditions, primarily along the lines of income, education, and occupation, also reported poorer indicators of sexual wellbeing, especially satisfaction and overall functioning. Most studies used unidimensional measures of socioeconomic status, treating them as individual-level control variables; few documented socioeconomics as structural pathways through which erotic inequities may arise. Based on these limitations, in part three we make calls for the integration of socioeconomic conditions into sexuality researchers’ paradigms of multi-level influences on sexuality.

  • Opotow, S., & McClelland, S. I. (2020) [pdf here]

    In this chapter, we take up the construct hate: what it is, how it appears, and how psychology can study it. Hate is often studied in its extreme forms (e.g., murder, genocide). We turn, however, to its more mundane forms to understand the normalization of this concept in the early decades of the 21st century in the United States. Mundane forms of hate can teach us to see its manifestations in contemporary life, its progression, and, we hope, to see the possibilities for its dismantling. We write this chapter in a moment when the president of United States produces a constant stream of disrespectful and violent political messages that have made hateful racist statements increasingly acceptable. His messages have, of course, affected how people treat one another; the day after Donald Trump won the 2016 U.S. presidential election, hate crimes connected with racial and ethnic bias increased. Given the increase of hate speech and hate-based violence in the contemporary United States, understanding hate as a psychological construct is an urgent matter that demands our attention now.

  • McClelland, S. I., & Opotow, S. (2011) [pdf here]

    Building from Deutsch’s intellectual contribution to social justice, this chapter situates examples of recent justice scholarship within classical and contemporary theory and research. It takes the genealogy of academic mentorship and research seriously and positions four generations of justice scholarship in relationship to one another: Kurt Lewin’s work on the psychology of groups and social norms; Morton Deutsch’s work on conflict and justice; Susan Opotow’s work on the scope of justice and moral exclusion; and Sara McClelland’s work on evaluations of satisfaction in intimate relationships. Over the course of this chapter, we use justice concepts as a way to discuss how individuals are influenced by history, status, and power when they evaluate experiences of injustice in the private sphere. [Google Books]

  • Opotow, S., & McClelland, S. I. (2007) [pdf here]

    Hate, a simple word, is easily understood by young children. But as a concept, hate is vast, complex, and slippery. The study of hate is not limited to one discipline; it is studied throughout the humanities and social sciences. This paper, which presents a psychological theory of hating, argues that hate is an understudied psychological construct and has particular relevance to justice research. Hate can trigger injustice, and injustice has the capacity to trigger derogation, violence, and hate. Relying on four literatures—justice, psychology, psychoanalysis, and criminal justice—we present a theory of hating that describes the formation, perpetuation, and expression of this influential emotional state. The Intensification Theory of Hating describes hate as a dynamic process that moves from antecedents to emotions, cognitions, morals, and behaviors. Hate, we argue, is not only an emotion; it becomes systemic when interactions among its components unfold over time to intensify hate. We conclude by proposing research approaches and questions that could address hate in psychological and justice research.

  • McClelland, S. I., & Hunter, L. E. (2013) [pdf here]

    In this essay we examine one rhetorical mechanism often used to determine threat in the public sphere – the category of “age appropriate.” The term “age appropriate sexuality” constrains how and when bodies are able to be sexual, and conversely, when bodies are considered “out of line.” Age appropriate sexuality demonstrates how certain bodies, and often young female African American bodies, are the sites of emergent threat and thereby, often sites of moral panic. While the phrase “age appropriate” is most recognized for its role in discussions of children, we expand this discussion to examine how messages about appropriate norms of sexual expression travel with women late into life. Using interview material from a study with women at the end of life, we forward a critique of the term “age appropriate sexuality” for its potential to constrict sexual expression for women of all ages.

  • Fahs, B., & McClelland, S. I. (2016) [pdf here]

    Attentive to the collision of sex and power, we add momentum to the ongoing development of the subfield of critical sexuality studies. We argue that this body of work is defined by its critical orientation toward the study of sexuality, along with a clear allegiance to critical modalities of thought, particularly feminist thought. Critical sexuality studies takes its cues from several other critical moments in related fields, including critical psychology, critical race theory, critical public health, and critical youth studies. Across these varied critical stances is a shared investment in examining how power and privilege operate, understanding the role of historical and epistemological violence in research, and generating new models and paradigms to guide empirical and theoretical research. With this guiding framework, we propose three central characteristics of critical sexuality studies: (a) conceptual analysis, with particular attention to how we define key terms and conceptually organize our research (e.g., attraction, sexually active, consent, agency, embodiment, sexual subjectivity); (b) attention to the material qualities of abject bodies, particularly bodies that are ignored, overlooked, or pushed out of bounds (e.g., viscous bodies, fat bodies, bodies in pain); and (c) heteronormativity and heterosexual privilege, particularly how assumptions about heterosexuality and heteronormativity circulate in sexuality research. Through these three critical practices, we argue that critical sexuality studies showcases how sex and power collide and recognizes (and tries to subvert) the various power imbalances that are deployed and replicated in sex research.

  • McClelland, S. I. (2014) [pdf here]

    Not enough is understood about the role of gender norms and sexual stigma in shaping individuals’ definitions of sexual satisfaction. The current study aimed to investigate the heterogeneity of definitions of sexual satisfaction in a sample of young adults, ages 18–28 (M = 22.6; SD = 4.78). Forty US participants (50% females; 45% LGBTQ; 53% white) sorted 63 statements about sexual satisfaction using a Q methodology design (Watts and Stenner, 2005), followed by semi-structured interviews. This mixed methods procedure enabled both a systematic and in-depth examination of the dimensions participants prioritized when determining their sexual satisfaction. Analysis of participants’ Q sorts indicated four distinct perspectives on sexual satisfaction: emotional and masculine; relational and feminine; partner focused; and orgasm focused. These four factors were further explored using participants’ interview data. Findings indicated that individuals interpreted sexual satisfaction using several key dimensions not regularly included in survey research. Existing survey items do not regularly attend to the gendered and heteronormative components of sexual satisfaction appraisals and as a result, important interpretive patterns may be overlooked.

Illness & Intimacy

This line of research examines the sexual health and information needs of women diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. Our focus has been how women who are extremely ill nevertheless confront gender and sexuality norms about their appearance and sexual availability, even as they are near the end of life.

 
  • Quinn, S., McClelland, S. I., & Gerber, Lynne (2022) [pdf here]

    To learn about the gendered experience of bodily loss, this paper analyzes interviews with women diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer (N = 32). Across the interviews, we find that specific bodily sites – hair, breast(s), thinness – and the gender norms associated with these sites do not loosen their grip near the end of life, but rather constitute meaningful sites of loss. Interviews demonstrate that when women lose a valued physical characteristic they also feel the loss of gendered statuses associated with that aspect of the body. We theorize the resulting emotional experience as positionality grief, or sorrow over an injured sense of self and that is tied to a sense of lowered place on social hierarchies. For feminist scholars, our study links women’s complex desires with their particular forms of embodiment that delimit spaces of possibility in the social world. For Bourdieusian scholars, our study calls attention to the importance of focusing not just on the acquisition, but the loss of embodied capital in social life. The implications of these bodily changes, therefore, structure how women grapple with gender and sexuality over the course of their lives.

  • McClelland, S.I. (2019) [pdf here]

    The maintenance of sexual health has become a topic of concern and an essential domain in studies of overall quality of life. Sexual health includes well-being across several domains, including physical, psychological, and social well-being, as well as factors related to one’s identities and relationships. These elements have historically been left outside of health psychology’s investigations, which have focused largely on genital function and sexual dysfunction. While others have usefully discussed measurement resources from a psychometric point of view, this chapter aims to expand the methodological possibilities when defining and assessing sexual health. The recommendations include measurement as well as research design considerations to help enrich researchers’ understanding of the psychological qualities of sexual health as experienced across diverse populations who might be coping with aging, illness, and/or treatment.

  • McClelland, S. I. (2017) [pdf here]

    Feminist researchers have highlighted the increased hyper- and heterosexualization of breast cancer by drawing attention to the gendered dimensions of disease. In a set of interviews with women diagnosed with metastatic disease, I examined how participants labored to fulfill feminine gender and sexual ideals. Two themes were explored: gender labor, which included feeling fat and unattractive, and sexual labor, which included managing partners' sexual demands and sexual pain. This study builds on emergent feminist critiques that challenge expectations for a woman to be a “sexy cancer patient” and highlights how gender and sexual ideals continue to affect women negatively, even when they are extremely ill.

  • McClelland, S. I. (2017) [pdf here]

    In this paper, I reflect on an important and infrequently discussed aspect of qualitative research: listening. Listening is often imagined as easy. It is however, is a difficult skill that not only takes practice, but also comes with possibilities and challenges for a researcher. In an effort to develop and elaborate a practice of listening in a research context, I develop the idea of vulnerable listening and offer 3 scenarios from my own research. These include: (a) emotional dangers associated with listening, (b) the often unacknowledged role of the listener’s body, and (c) the role of extreme emotions in research, such as feeling outraged. Drawing on my own experiences interviewing women diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer, I highlight how researchers who collect data by listening might care for their own and others’ vulnerability. Toward this end, I outline several strategies for researchers looking to support and maintain a practice of vulnerable listening.

  • McClelland, S. I. (2016) [pdf here]

    Comments left by participants in the margins of a survey are commonly ignored during data analysis. Rather than overlook these marginalia, we describe a qualitative analysis of the notes, underlines, and cross-outs left by participants in the margins of the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI; Rosen et al., 2000). Participants who were diagnosed with late stage breast cancer had taken the FSFI as part of a larger multi-method quality of life study. In our analysis, we identify 3 categories to analyze the 136 instances of marginalia left next to FSFI items: clarifications, corrections, and noting items as “not applicable.” Using these marginalia as guidance, we developed a modified scoring procedure for the FSFI that accounted for those participants who marked items as “not applicable” in their marginalia but would have been dropped from analysis due to missing data. We offer guidelines for researchers interested in analyzing marginalia as a means to incorporate and amplify participant feedback in survey research design. This is especially important when even well-validated instruments are used to make, for example, clinical diagnoses and treatment decisions, but do not adequately account for participants’ lives. Studies of marginalia enable qualitatively derived insights to be effectively incorporated into survey methodology, enabling us to better attend to the ways participants communicate and share their lives with us over the course of any study.

  • McClelland, S. I. (2016) [pdf here]

    Research has found that breast cancer and its treatments can have severe consequences for patients' sexual quality of life (SQoL); however, patients often report not knowing about possible impacts of treatment on their sexual well-being. This gap in information provision has been especially prominent for those diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer (MBC). To address the development of resources for patients diagnosed with MBC, the current study examined patients' descriptions of resources needed to support their SQoL in palliative care. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 32 women diagnosed with MBC, aged 35-77 in a US breast cancer practice. Patients were asked to describe those issues that were most pressing and the supports they would find most valuable to improving their SQoL. Thematic analysis focused on what was missing in their care and what they wished they knew (or wish they had been told) about cancer and their SQoL. Four themes were developed from the interviews: (1) unexpected embodied loss and mourning; (2) silences; (3) desires for others' expertise, and (4) worries about normalcy. Findings across these themes highlighted how patients' psychosexual needs included both pressing instrumental needs as well as desires for support from oncological medical providers concerning the subjective experience of breast cancer.

  • McClelland, S. I., Holland, K. J., & Griggs, J. J. (2015) [pdf here]

    Too little is understood about the quality of life (QoL) concerns of patients diagnosed with advanced disease. While body image has been found to be consistently important for women with early-stage breast cancer, the impact of body image on women with metastatic breast cancer (MBC) is less frequently studied. This cross-sectional study aimed to identify factors affecting QoL in a sample of patients diagnosed with MBC, with particular attention to body image, disease site, and time since diagnosis. In total, 113 women diagnosed with MBC completed two QoL scales (EORTC QLQ30; EORTC BR23) as part of a larger study. Clinical characteristics were obtained via medical record review. Demographics, disease characteristics, and clinical factors were examined. Time since diagnosis and location of metastases were found to affect patients’ QoL, and most strikingly, this effect often differed for those with higher and lower body image. Body image appears to remain highly influential even for those living with a shortened life expectancy. These findings indicate that the development of QoL support should more carefully consider patients diagnosed with MBC and the unique sets of body concerns that affect this population.

  • McClelland, S. I., Holland, K. J., & Griggs, J. J. (2015) [pdf here]

    While research on the sexual health of women with early stage cancer has grown extensively over the past decade, markedly less information is available to support the sexual health needs of women diagnosed with advanced breast cancer. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 32 women diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer (ages 35 to 77) about questions they had concerning their sexual health and intimate relationships. All participants were recruited from a comprehensive cancer center at a large Midwestern university. Three themes were examined: the role of sexual activity and intimate touch in participants' lives, unmet information needs about sexual health, and communication with medical providers about sexual concerns. Findings indicated that sexual activities with partners were important; however, participants worried about their own physical limitations and reported frequent physical (e.g., bone pains) and vaginal pain associated with intercourse. When women raised concerns about these issues in clinical settings, medical providers often focused exclusively on vaginal lubricants, which did not address the entirety of women's problems or concerns. In addition, women diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer reported needing additional resources about specialized vaginal lubricants, non-penetrative and non-genitally focused sex, and sexual positions that did not compromise their physical health yet still provided pleasure.

  • McClelland, S. I. (2012) [pdf here]

    Over the past 20 years, sexual quality of life has become of increasing interest to psychologists studying quality of life with ill and/or aging populations. As people are living longer with chronic illnesses, the maintenance of sexual health has become a topic of concern and an essential domain of overall quality of life (QoL; see Arrington, Cofrancesco, & Wu, 2004). This emerging body of research has undoubtedly helped to guide clinical interventions and to increase quality of life for patients and their intimate partners. However, questions remain as to whether definitions and operationalizations of sexual function commonly used in research settings are sufficient to describe the range and scope of sexual quality of life (SQoL) experienced by both men and women, especially those who are ill, recovering from illness, or living with a chronic illness. This chapter offers 10 suggestions to help guide researchers in this burgeoning area of study. The recommendations include measurement as well as research design considerations in order to help enrich researchers’ understanding of the psychological qualities of sexual quality of life as experienced across diverse populations who are coping with aging and/or conditions of illness, and perhaps treatment. [Google Books]

  • McClelland, S. I., & Metzl, J. M. (2007) [pdf here]

    Impotence is a type of sexual dysfunction that is associated with problems maintaining an erection, ejaculating, or reaching orgasm. The term traditionally implies that a man is unable to achieve an erect *penis. Impotence also connotes that, because a man does not have an erect penis, he is, by association, considered to be weak or feeble. The term impotence has been largely replaced with erectile or sexual dysfunction when referring to a person’s physical body. Impotence remains, however, a loaded word in terms of defining men and masculinity; it refers to a man who lacks political power, and by inference, also lacks sexual power.