Not Like Everybody Else but We're the Same: Psychosocial Variables Compared Across Diverse Sexual and Gender Identities.

Abstract

Sexual and gender minority (SGM) people are underrepresented in psychological research. Part of the underrepresentation of SGM people likely stems from potential participants' unwillingness to join a study, but more concerningly, researchers exclude data from SGM participants. Furthermore, much of SGM research focuses on existing health disparities and risk factors rather than wellness-framed and personality research. To fill in this gap, the current study aims to quantify effect sizes of similarities/differences across a broad range of psychosocial measures. Applying the framework of the Gender Similarities Hypothesis, we compare means, variances, and correlations across 34 psychosocial variables between categories of SGM, gender identity, sexual orientation, relationship status, and monogamy (N = 1743). Data was collected online mainly through paid ads on Instagram. Consistently, we find largely similarities across gender identity, sexual orientation, and relationship structure categories. These results support a general expectation that similarities are more common than differences in normative psychological domains, although clear differences in means and variances exist for specific experiences and outcomes. This work informs the inclusion of diverse identities in basic psychological research and further speaks to the generalizability of past findings to populations historically underrepresented in psychological science.