Discrimination & Mental Health among Sexual Minorities
The projects below focus on understanding the links from discrimination and stigma to mental health and psychopathology among lesbian, bisexual, and gay individuals through secondary data analysis and collection of original data.
Current Projects
Geo-Spatial Network Mapping of HIV Prevention among Men who have Sex with Men (MSM):
Time Varying Effects of Discrimination on Suicide Ideation and Attempts between White, Black, and Latino Sexual Minorities :
Discrimination and Psychopathology among Latin American Gay Men:
Measuring the Impact of Stigmatizing Language for Lesbian and Gay Individuals:
- Collaborators: Joshua Rosenberger, Lik Sam Chan, Elija Cassidy
- Data set: profile data scrapped from geo-spatial networking app
- My role: Data analyst, study conceptualization, manuscript development
- Status: Analysis complete, results presented at the Public Health Australia Conference (2019), paper in preparation
- Major finding: PrEP providers are inevitably distributed by race and age among men who have sex with men in urban areas.
Time Varying Effects of Discrimination on Suicide Ideation and Attempts between White, Black, and Latino Sexual Minorities :
- Collaborators: Jessica Fish, Cara Rice, Allen Mallory, Natasha Williams
- Data set: NESARC-III (National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions-III)
- My role: Data analyst, study conceptualization
- Status: Analysis complete, paper in preparation
- Major finding: Black, Latinx, and White sexual minorities are at elevated risk for suicide in early adulthood. This vulnerability stretches furthest into adulthood for White sexual minorities.
Discrimination and Psychopathology among Latin American Gay Men:
- Collaborators: Joshua Rosenberger, Lindsey C. Potter, Phillip Schnarrs, Matthew Mimiaga, Katie Biello
- Data set: cross-sectional, web-based sample of 4,000+ gay men ages 18-24 in Latin America
- My role: Data analyst, paper development
- Status: Paper finalization, results presented at Society for Behavioral Medicine (2019)
- Major finding: Associations between discrimination and suicidality, alcohol dependency, and depressive symptoms is attenuated but not moderated by social support, self acceptance, and self esteem.
Measuring the Impact of Stigmatizing Language for Lesbian and Gay Individuals:
- Collaborators: Jessica Matsick, Anna Salomaa, Lindsay Palmer, Mary Kruk
- Data set: three experimental studies manipulating language to simulate and measure impact of stigma
- My role: Co-investigator, data collection and design, study conceptualization, data management
- Status: Paper development, data collection, presented in Gerontological Society of America conference (2018) and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Convention (2019)
- Major finding: Lesbian and gay persons perceive the use of the word "homosexual" as stigmatizing compared to "gay/lesbian," however, heterosexual persons perceived no difference.
