Original articleDoes It Get Better? A Longitudinal Analysis of Psychological Distress and Victimization in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Youth
Section snippets
Participants
Participants from this study were part of Project Q2, a longitudinal study of LGBTQ youth who were between the ages of 16 and 20 years at baseline. All participants were youth living in the Chicago area who self-identified as LGBT, “queer,” “questioning,” or indicated they were attracted to the same gender. Participants were recruited via multiple methods, including incentivized peer recruitment and e-mail advertisements, cards, and flyers distributed in LGBT-identified neighborhoods and
Developmental trajectories
The estimated intraclass correlation (ICC, .414) indicated that 41.4% of the variance of psychological distress existed between individuals and 58.6% existed within individuals over time. This can be interpreted to mean that individual measures of psychological distress vary substantially over time and that more variance is observed longitudinally within people versus between people. Age at each wave was entered into the model along with the between-subject covariates to test the hypothesis
Discussion
Our results suggest that the psychological distress of LGBTQ adolescents does decrease across adolescence and into young adulthood. In addition, our analyses suggest that the reduction in distress appears to be related to the co-occurring developmental decline in LGBTQ victimization. In a time-lagged model, prior rates of victimization predicted later levels of distress, whereas prior levels of support did not. Previous studies have shown the relationship between victimization and mental health
Funding Sources
This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (grant, R21MH095413; PI, B.M.), an American Foundation for Suicide Prevention grant (PI; B.M.), the William T. Grant Foundation Scholars Award (PI; B.M.), and the David Bohnett Foundation (PI; B.M.), and by the IMPACT LGBT Health and Development Program, Northwestern University.
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