An Online Intervention to Promote Predictors of Supportive Parenting for Sexual Minority Youth

This article presents the Parent Resource for Increasing Sexual Minority Support (PRISMS), an interactive online intervention designed by the authors to promote parental self-efficacy and behavioral intentions for supporting a sexual minority child. The intervention was developed based upon psychological literature about parent support and feedback from parents of sexual minority youth and psychologists, and contains 5 interactive online modules: normalizing parent experiences, psychoeducation, reflection upon existing support, rehearsal of support, and affirmation. We assessed the feasibility and acceptability of PRISMS and collected pilot data to assess its efficacy. One hundred eighty-four U.S. parents of sexual minority youth Ages 13 to 18 were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk and were randomly assigned to complete either PRISMS (n = 92) or a control: an existing resource with psychoeducation about sexual orientation (n = 92). Analyses revealed that PRISMS was highly acceptable to participants and established the noninferiority of the intervention relative to the control in terms of credibility and affect at posttest. Two analyses of covariance did not establish significant associations between PRISMS and parental self-efficacy or behavioral intentions for supportive parenting, although we found small effect sizes (d = .31 and .21). Post hoc exploratory analyses offered preliminary support for the efficacy of PRISMS with parents who were highly distressed about their child's sexual orientation, suggesting that this might be an important population for future research. We discuss implications for research and practice, including the importance of interventions for parents of sexual minority youth.