Adoption of Black children by White parents in heterosexual and homosexual relationships: Exploring mental health trainees' explicit and implicit attitudes

ABSTRACT

We investigated 163 (82.2% female; 73% White; and 91.4% heterosexual) mental health trainees' explicit and implicit attitudes toward heterosexual, lesbian, and gay White couples adopting and raising Black children. Explicit attitudes were assessed with a vignette depicting a Black child in need of a home. Implicit attitudes were assessed with the multifactor implicit association test (IAT) protocol. Explicit data showed that most participants indicated no strong family preference. However, IAT data showed that most trainees had implicit preference, with a moderate preference for lesbian couples over heterosexual couples and a moderate-to-strong preference for lesbian couples over gay couples. The trainees only demonstrated a very weak preference for heterosexual couples over gay couples. Overall, congruence between explicit and implicit is very low. Implications for training are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• implicit attitudes
• transracial adoption
• same-sex adoption
• mental health trainees

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to acknowledge the contribution of Ms. Lydia Newland for creating the stick figure portraits used in the study. Ms. Newland is a Mental Health Counseling Associate (MHCA) at the Children's Center in Vancouver, Washington.

Funding

This work was supported, in part, by the authors' university's Research & Innovation Internal Awards Program under Grant No. 0052672.