See more of our coverage in your search results.
Three WashU Brown School students affiliated with the Sexual Health and Gender (SHAG) Center contributed to recent peer-reviewed research on sexual health, identity and gender. Two doctoral students served as first authors, while a recent Master of Social Work graduate was a co-author.
Shauntal Van Dreel, a third-year social work doctoral student, is the first author of “Resource Access and Use: Impacts on Distal Minority Stressors for Racial and Sexual Diverse Youth in Rural and Urban Contexts,” published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence. The study examines how access to resources may affect minority stress among racially and sexually diverse youth in rural and urban settings.
“What I hope people will take away from the findings is that while rural LGBTQIA+ adolescents experience heightened school-specific discrimination and an unwelcoming school climate compared to urban peers, they did not significantly differ in levels of peer support, coping skills, or experiencing social marginalization in their communities,” Van Dreel said. “This suggests that rural disadvantage does not tell the whole story, and that other protective factors are meaningfully influencing the well-being of rural LGBTQIA+ adolescents.”
Van Dreel’s co-authors include Brown School faculty members Joshua Rusow, assistant professor, and Harmony Rhodes, research associate professor, as well as the late Jeremy Goldbach, the Masters and Johnson Distinguished Professor in Sexual Health and Education.
Yutian Chen, a second-year social work doctoral student, also recently published research as first author. His study, “Home as The First Closet: Examining Associations Between Individual, Psychological, and Familial Factors and LGBTQ+ Adolescents’ Identity Disclosure to Family,” was published in LGBTQ+ Family: An Interdisciplinary Journal. The study explores individual, psychological and familial factors associated with LGBTQ+ adolescents’ disclosure of their identities to family.
“We tend to assume that if an adolescent is out to their family, home must be a safe place,” Chen said. “Our findings suggest otherwise: adolescents with more adverse childhood experiences were more likely to be out to their families. Visibility is not the same as safety.”
Chen’s co-authors include Rusow; Brown School doctoral students Morgan Van Vleck and Anwesha Chatterjee; and Rhodes.
For doctoral students, serving as the lead author of a peer-reviewed study is an important step in their development as researchers and scholars, said Paz Galupo, the Audre Lorde Distinguished Professor for Sexual Health & Education and director of the SHAG Center.
“First-author publications are a major milestone for our students,” Galupo said. “Stepping into that lead role means taking ownership of a study from conception through publication. Seeing our students take the lead on research that contributes to the field is incredibly rewarding.”
The research also reflects the range of topics explored through the SHAG Center. Recent Brown School graduate Willow Rosen, MSW ’26, contributed as a co-author of “From Avoidance to Engagement: Trans Masculine and Nonbinary Strategies to Cope with Gender Dysphoria During Sex,” published in the International Journal of Sexual Health. Galupo was senior author on this publication.