Coping With Sexual Orientation–Related Minority Stress

ABSTRACT

Little is known about how adolescents cope with minority stressors related to sexual orientation. This study examined 245 lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) young adult’s (ages 21–25) retrospective reports of coping in response to LGB minority stress during adolescence (ages 13–19) to test the reliability and validity of a measure of minority stress coping. Further, the study examined associations between LGB minority stress coping and young adult psychosocial adjustment and high school attainment. Validation and reliability was found for three minority stress coping strategies: LGB-specific strategies (e.g., involvement with LGBT organizations), alternative-seeking strategies (e.g., finding new friends), and cognitive strategies (e.g., imagining a better future). LGB-specific strategies were associated with better psychosocial adjustment and greater likelihood of high school attainment in young adulthood, whereas alternative-seeking and cognitive-based strategies were associated with poorer adjustment and less likelihood of high school attainment.

KEYWORDS:

• Coping
• educational attainment
• minority stress
• psychosocial adjustment
• sexual orientation

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of our funder, the California Endowment, and the contribution of our community advisory groups and the many adolescents, families, and young adults who shared their lives and experiences with us. Support for this project was also provided by a Loan Repayment Award by the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities (L60 MD008862; Toomey).

Notes

1. Our sampling frame included young adults who identified as LGBT during adolescence (see Ryan, 2010). All of the transgender young adults in this sample also identified as lesbian/gay, bisexual, homosexual, or queer. Because of the focus on coping with sexual orientation–related stressors in this article, the LGB acronym is used to describe the sample throughout the article.

2. Sex assigned at birth (i.e., male and female) was used for the group variable in these analyses given that the cell size for transgender for was too small to examine invariance by gender identity (i.e., men, women, and transgender persons).

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of our funder, the California Endowment, and the contribution of our community advisory groups and the many adolescents, families, and young adults who shared their lives and experiences with us. Support for this project was also provided by a Loan Repayment Award by the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities (L60 MD008862; Toomey).