New Developments in the Field: Measuring Community Climate

Abstract

Community climate is the degree of support for GLBT people within a specific locale. In this paper we describe the elements of community climate, theorize how it is produced, and argue that this approach provides an important elaboration of Meyer's (2003) minority stress model. Furthermore, we present a new methodology for assessing community climate that could be used by any researcher with a geographically diverse data set that includes location identifiers such as ZIP code. In closing we discuss the theoretical, empirical, and practical contributions that could be made by GLBT family scholars who utilize this new technique for measuring community climate.

KEYWORDS:

• Community climate
• GLBT
• measurement
• minority stress theory
• well-being