6 - (IOP 28) News Exposure and Social Support on LGBTQIA+ People's Feelings of Community Safety and Acceptance

States across the country have proposed and enacted hundreds of policies to restrict the rights and healthcare of LGBTQIA+ people. These policies limit LGBTQIA+ people’s rights in myriad ways. Increased exposure to news about these policies may negatively impact LGBTQIA+ people’s mental health and feelings of safety. At the same time, LGBTQIA+ people may have social support that serves as a protective factor against the negative psychological impacts of these policies. Our study aims to examine whether exposure to news and emotional and social support are associated with LGBTQIA+ people’s feelings of safety and acceptance in their communities. We hypothesize that (1) higher news exposure will be associated with lower self-reported feelings of safety and acceptance of LGBTQIA+ people in participants’ communities; and (2) that greater social and emotional support will be associated with greater feelings of safety and acceptance of LGBTQIA+ people in participants’ communities.

We sampled LGBTQIA+ participants (n = 61) from The PRIDE Study, a national, prospective cohort study of LGBTQIA+ adults, living in states that have enacted or proposed LGBTQIA+-targeted policies. Participants completed a 15-minute online survey from July to October 2024. Participants rated how frequently they consume the news on a single-item measure with a 5-point rating scale (1 = “daily”, 5 = “never”); they rated their social and emotional support on the four-item Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS©) emotional and social support scales (response range from 1 = “never” to 5 = “always”). Participants rated the perceived safety and acceptance of their communities for LGBTQIA+ people (the present study’s primary outcome) on 5-point scales ranging from 1 = “extremely safe” to 5 = “extremely unsafe”, and 1 = “extremely accepting” to 5 = “extremely unaccepting,” respectively.

Among this sample, thirty-five (57.4%) reported being daily news consumers. Fifteen (24.6%) participants reported their communities were “unsafe” for gender minority people and 9 (14.8%) reported their communities were “unsafe” for sexual minority people. Twenty-two (36.1%) participants reported that their communities are “unaccepting” for gender minority people and 1 participant (1.6%) reported their community was “unaccepting” for sexual minority people.

We will conduct multinomial logistic regression analyses (to be complete in July 2025) to explore how news exposure and social and emotional support predict LGBTQIA+ individuals’ feelings of acceptance and safety while controlling for other demographic variables (i.e., ethnoracial identity and gender identity).

This research is relevant to understanding risks and protective factors for feelings of safety, as LGBTQIA+ people face growing policy attacks at the state- and federal-level, which may have negative and downstream impacts on LGBTQIA+ people’s well-being. Findings will reveal how increased exposure to news may be associated with LGBTQIA+ people’s feelings of safety and acceptance in their communities as well as potential protective factor of social and emotional support that may buffer the effects of these policies.