Girls' relationship authenticity and self-esteem across adolescence.

Feminist psychologists have long posited that relationship authenticity (i.e., the congruence between what one thinks and feels and what one does and says in relational contexts) is integral to self-esteem and well-being. Guided by a feminist developmental framework, the authors investigated the role of relationship authenticity in promoting girls' self-esteem over the course of adolescence. Latent growth curve modeling was used to test the association between relationship authenticity and self-esteem with data from a 5-year, 3-wave longitudinal study of 183 adolescent girls. Results revealed that both relationship authenticity and self-esteem increased steadily in a linear fashion from the 8th to the 12th grade. Girls who scored high on the measure of relationship authenticity in the 8th grade experienced greater increases in self-esteem over the course of adolescence than girls who scored low on relationship authenticity. Further, girls who increased in authenticity also tended to increase in self-esteem over the course of adolescence. The importance of a feminist developmental framework for identifying and understanding salient dimensions of female adolescence is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"I keep that hush-hush": Male survivors of sexual abuse and the challenges of disclosure.

Disclosure is a prominent variable in child sexual abuse research, but little research has examined male disclosure experiences. Sixteen male survivors of childhood sexual abuse were interviewed regarding experiences of disclosure. Analytic techniques included a grounded theory approach to coding and the use of conceptually clustered matrices. Participants described distinct personal (e.g., lack of cognitive awareness, intentional avoidance, emotional readiness, and shame), relational (e.g., fears about negative repercussions, isolation), and sociocultural (e.g., lack of acceptance for men to experience or acknowledge victimization) reasons for their struggles with disclosure. These results highlight that barriers to disclosure exist in multiple domains of experience and are encountered across the lifespan. Implications for future research and clinical interventions are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)