Protester, Partygoer, or Simply Playing It Down? The Impact of Crowd Affiliations on LGBT Emerging Adults’ Socioemotional and Academic Adjustment to College

ABSTRACT

Although peer crowd affiliations have been studied among emerging adults in college, this work has yet to focus in on LGBT-identifying students. Accordingly, the current study a) surveyed the peer crowd landscape using a sample of 234 LGBT students (M_age = 19.89, SD = 1.55; 70.51% female, 18.38% male, 11.11% other) at a small, private, liberal arts college in Southern California, and b) explored the relationships between self-reported peer crowd affiliations and LGBT students’ adjustment (i.e., loneliness, belongingness, and academic-, alcohol-, drug-, and sex-risk behaviors). Results point to the existence of four underlying peer crowd dimensions among LGBT students: protester, nonvocal, social, and athletic. Furthermore, affiliation with these peer crowds was found to relate to students’ self-reported loneliness and academic-, drug-, and sex-risk behaviors.

KEYWORDS:

• LGBT
• peer crowds
• crowd affiliation
• student adjustment
• loneliness
• belongingness
• risk behaviors

Notes

1. From this point forward, for the sake of brevity, we will refer to LGBTQIA+ as LGBT.

2. Data from 6 heterosexual-identifying people were included in our final sample for 2 reasons. First, these individuals self-reported substantially identifying with the LGBT peer crowds on campus. In some cases, these participants indicated that they identified with an LGBT crowd to a maximal extent (i.e., they marked 5 on the 5-point peer crowd affiliation response scale). Second, it is possible that these participants self-identified as heterosexual because they are questioning their sexuality and were not sure how to self-identify, or were uncomfortable doing so.

3. Please see Appendix A for explanations of all crowd affiliation items.

4. Redacted for purposes of participant anonymity (single words replaced with “XX”).