L or G or B or T: Matching Sexual and Gender Minorities with Subpopulation-Specific Interventions

ABSTRACT

Sexual and gender minorities (SGM) may benefit from psychological interventions tailored to specific subpopulations (e.g., lesbians, gay men, bisexual people, transgender people) given differing experiences with stigma. However, determining the inclusion/exclusion process for subpopulation-specific interventions is challenging and recommendations for this process are scarce. We developed and evaluated a matching procedure to place 1183 SGM participants into four targeted online interventions designed to reduce internalized stigma for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. We evaluated participant attrition, efficacy, satisfaction with placement, and qualitative feedback across the four interventions. Results indicated that our matching procedure was time-efficient and largely successful in terms of low attrition, high satisfaction, and reaching segments of the SGM population not usually captured with the LGBT acronym. Based on these findings, we offer six practical guidelines for devising the inclusion/exclusion process or matching procedure for future subpopulation-specific SGM interventions studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Classification
• LGBT
• subpopulation
• intervention
• sexual orientation
• gender identity

Acknowledgment

Findings in this article were previously presented at the 123rd Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We recognize that the terms MTF and FTM may be offensive to some transgender people. We chose these terms based on their common usage in 2015 when we collected data.

Additional information

Funding

Data collection for this article was financially supported in part by the University of California, Santa Barbara Academic Senate Grant awarded to Tania Israel.