Identity, victimization, and support: Facebook experiences and mental health among LGBTQ youth

Abstract

The rise of social networking sites (SNSs) has created new contexts within which lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth and young adults manage their social identities and relationships. On one hand, SNSs provide important social support; on the other, they comprise another realm for victimization and discrimination. Context collapse refers to the ways diverse subgroups (e.g., family, co-workers) are often united in Facebook networks, which presents unique challenges related to outness. In this study, we examine the Facebook contexts of a cohort of LGBTQ youth and young adults with regard to outness, victimization, social support, and psychological distress by first examining descriptive statistics and correlations, and then testing a series of multiple regressions in an analytic sample of 175 (Mage = 24.02 years) LGBTQ youth. Participants reported levels of daily Facebook use comparable to other samples of non-LGBTQ youth; however, they reported greater use of security controls, which may function as a tool for managing outness. Participants reported slightly lower outness across relational subgroups on Facebook, and associations between outness to relational subgroups were slightly stronger on Facebook, illustrating the potential impact of context collapse. Regression results showed that great victimization, cyberbullying, and the offering of support online were positively associated with psychological distress. Study findings illuminate how LGBTQ youth use and manage their identities on Facebook and highlight the importance of online contexts in shaping wellbeing for LGBtQ outh and young adults.

Facebook-based social support and health: A systematic review.

“…Kim & Lee, 2011;Liu & Yu, 2013), and college engagement (Gray et al, 2013). Higher levels of Facebook-based social support also predicted lower levels of a wide range of negative outcomes that were also measured, including depression (Frison & Eggermont, 2015, 2016), victimisation (Cole et al, 2017McConnell et al, 2017), and loneliness (K. T. Lee et al, 2013;Seo et al, 2016). There were some notable exceptions to these findings; for example, for persons with little to no social anxiety (Indian & Grieve, 2014), and male adolescent boys (Frison & Eggermont, 2016).…”

“…There is evidence to suggest that a person can overuse or even become addicted to social media (Andreassen & Pallesen, 2014). An additional consideration is cyberbullying, which can negatively affect levels of online social support (McConnell et al, 2017). Levels of compulsive Facebook use, or cyberbullying would directly impact the site as a medium for social support.…”

“Everybody Puts Their Whole Life on Facebook”: Identity Management and the Online Social Networks of LGBTQ Youth

“…Given these complex relational landscapes, the phenomenon of online context collapse presents particular challenges for LGBTQ young people. To negotiate these disclosure-related challenges, LGBTQ young people engage in a variety of identity management strategies, including monitoring their online self-expression, using privacy and security controls, strategically managing their friendship networks, creating multiple accounts, curating and editing personal photographs, and restricting LGBTQ-related to other, more anonymous online contexts [ 2 , 21 , 22 , 23 ]. These strategies require a good deal of labor—both traditional labor with respect to time and effort and emotional labor with respect to self-presentation [ 9 , 10 ].…”

SNS and the Lived Experiences of Queer Youth

“…Research shows that SNS use by queer people can lead to this minority stress, with them potentially experiencing victimisation, discrimination, or being inadvertently outed [6,11,14,19]. For example, queer youth are 2-3x more likely to be the targets of cyber-bullying [14].…”