Study on Sexual Reorientation Therapy Deflates 'Coercion' Accusations
by Jim Brown
October 4, 2005
(AgapePress) - A new peer-reviewed study indicates people who want to leave the homosexual lifestyle prefer therapists who will assist them.
Twenty-eight clients who had sought sexual reorientation therapy were asked to rate the helpfulness of their therapists on 20 different practices. Therapists who worked with their clients toward sexual reorientation were viewed as generally helpful, while therapists who opposed their client's objective of sexual reorientation were viewed as generally unhelpful on a variety of dimensions.
Grove City College professor Warren Throckmorton is the study's lead author. He believes the study debunks the claim that clients are often coerced into renouncing their homosexual lifestyle.
"This is a study that does need to be repeated with more clients and more therapists," Dr. Throckmorton acknowledges, "but what we found in this particular inquiry of the 28 clients who reported on 80 therapists is that none of those therapists tried to pressure clients into reorientation therapy."
According to Throckmorton, 70 percent of the clients who saw themselves as exclusively homosexual prior to therapy rated themselves as either "exclusively" or "predominantly" heterosexual at the time of the study.
"You know, we can't say from this study how many people in the general population could make a change like this, but here's another study that reports people who have made a pretty significant change in their sexuality, and that they were pleased by that."
The study will be published in the Winter 2005 issue of the Journal of Psychology and Christianity. Dr. Gary Welton, also a professor at Grove City College, collaborated with Throckmorton on the study.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
