An Assessment of Racial and Ethnic and Sexual Identity Centrality and Smoking Behavior

ABSTRACT

Although evidence indicates that identity centrality, or identity importance, can serve as a positive coping mechanism regarding well-being, less is known if it can also buffer against health risk behaviors like cigarette smoking. This study uses an intercategorical intersectional approach using data from 1,571 Black and Latino/a sexual and gender minority adults in the Social Justice Sexuality Project to assess the relationship between sexual and racial and ethnic identity centrality and smoking patterns. Relative risk ratios from multinomial logistic regressions highlight three findings. First, there is no evidence of a significant association between identity centrality and smoking behavior nor evidence of a significant interaction effect between racial and ethnic and sexual identity centrality. Once models were adjusted for education, the association between centrality and smoking was no longer significant. Second, results indicate that education, gender identity, familial support and outness were significant predictors of smoking behaviors. Third, results suggest that there are significant differences across the intersection of race and ethnicity and sexual identity in relative risk of smoking. In addition, findings highlight elevated risk of engaging in more casual behaviors of smoking as opposed to heightened smoking behavior among both Black and Latino/a sexual minority adults.

KEYWORDS:

• Health behaviors
• identity centrality
• race and ethnicity
• sexuality
• intersectionality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Respondents missing observations on smoking status (n = 300), race and ethnicity (n = 149), sexual identity (n = 179) or identity centrality (n = 422) were excluded from the sample.

2. Respondents were given the addition option of indicating that “Family doesn’t know I am LGBT.” To present a measure that reflects levels of perceived support without conflating disclosure and support, those responses were treated as missing data.

Additional information

Funding

The authors reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.