Promoting a positive school climate for sexual and gender minority youth through a systems approach: A theory-informed qualitative study.

Abstract

Pervasive bias-based bullying of sexual and gender minority youth amid often hostile school climates signals the importance of systems approaches to effect change. Nevertheless, most research on bullying victimization tends to adopt either lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)-specific approaches or broader approaches that omit mention of LGBT youth. We conducted a qualitative study, with the systems view of school climate as an organizing analytical framework, to explore determinants of school climate for LGBT youth and strategies for intervention. In-depth, semistructured interviews with 16 key informants, including teachers, school staff, administrators, frontline community providers, and experts on bullying victimization of LGBT youth, illustrate reciprocal and multilevel factors that produce school climates, which in turn foster or prevent bullying of LGBT youth. Not only do distal factors (e.g., LGBT-affirmative legislation, targeted resource allocation for LGBT programming) impact school microsystems, but proximal factors in the microsystem, including enacted homophobia and transphobia through multilateral interpersonal interactions, also influence meso- and macrolevel phenomena, such as the values and mission of the school. Participants recommended multilateral interventions and training that address both proximal and distal contexts of school social ecologies, including teacher-student, peer-to-peer (e.g., gay-straight alliances), and teacher-administrator interactions; behavioral health professional roles and responsibilities; school curricula and libraries; school-board engagement with individual schools; LGBT-inclusive policies; targeted resource allocation; and systemwide accountability. Positive school climates for LGBT youth are promoted through multilevel and reciprocal interventions that support social, psychological, and physical safety not just for LGBT students but for all students. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).