Minority Stress Experienced by LGBTQ Online Communities during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Authors: Yunhao Yuan, Gaurav Verma, Barbara Keller, Talayeh Aledavood

11 pages, 5 figures

Results of the summarizing process for the arXiv paper: 2205.09511v3

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The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the lives of minorities, particularly those in the LGBTQ community, due to pre-existing social disadvantages and health disparities. While extensive research has been conducted on the pandemic's effects on various aspects of the general population's lives, few studies have focused on the LGBTQ population. In this paper titled "Minority Stress Experienced by LGBTQ Online Communities during the COVID-19 Pandemic," Yunhao Yuan, Gaurav Verma, Barbara Keller, and Talayeh Aledavood develop and evaluate two sets of machine learning classifiers using pre-pandemic and during-pandemic datasets to identify Twitter posts exhibiting minority stress unique to members of the LGBTQ population due to their sexual and gender identities. The authors demonstrate that their best pre- and during-pandemic models show strong and stable performance for detecting posts containing minority stress. They also investigate linguistic differences in minority stress posts across pre- and during-pandemic periods, finding that anger words are strongly associated with minority stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors explore how the pandemic has affected the emotional states of the LGBTQ population by adopting propensity score-based matching to perform a causal analysis. Their findings reveal that compared to a group with similar pre-pandemic behavioral attributes from the general population, members of the LGBTQ community experience a greater increase in cognitive words usage but worsened observable attribute in positive emotion words usage. These results have implications for public health domains and policymakers to provide adequate support, especially with respect to mental health, for members of the LGBTQ community during future crises.
AI-generated keywords: LGBTQ COVID-19 Minority Stress Pre-pandemic During-pandemic

AI-generated Key Points

  • COVID-19 pandemic has impacted minorities, especially those in the LGBTQ community due to pre-existing social disadvantages and health disparities.
  • Few studies have focused on the pandemic's effects on the LGBTQ population.
  • A paper titled "Minority Stress Experienced by LGBTQ Online Communities during the COVID-19 Pandemic" develops and evaluates machine learning classifiers to identify Twitter posts exhibiting minority stress unique to members of the LGBTQ population due to their sexual and gender identities.
  • Best pre-pandemic and during-pandemic models show strong and stable performance for detecting posts containing minority stress.
  • Anger words are strongly associated with minority stress during the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Members of the LGBTQ community experience a greater increase in cognitive words usage but worsened observable attribute in positive emotion words usage compared to a group with similar pre-pandemic behavioral attributes from the general population.
  • Results have implications for public health domains and policymakers to provide adequate support, especially with respect to mental health, for members of the LGBTQ community during future crises.
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Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted the lives of minorities, such as members of the LGBTQ community (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) due to pre-existing social disadvantages and health disparities. Although extensive research has been carried out on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on different aspects of the general population's lives, few studies are focused on the LGBTQ population. In this paper, we develop and evaluate two sets of machine learning classifiers using a pre-pandemic and a during-pandemic dataset to identify Twitter posts exhibiting minority stress, which is a unique pressure faced by the members of the LGBTQ population due to their sexual and gender identities. We demonstrate that our best pre- and during-pandemic models show strong and stable performance for detecting posts that contain minority stress. We investigate the linguistic differences in minority stress posts across pre- and during-pandemic periods. We find that anger words are strongly associated with minority stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. We explore the impact of the pandemic on the emotional states of the LGBTQ population by adopting propensity score-based matching to perform a causal analysis. The results show that the LGBTQ population have a greater increase in the usage of cognitive words and worsened observable attribute in the usage of positive emotion words than the group of the general population with similar pre-pandemic behavioral attributes. Our findings have implications for the public health domain and policy-makers to provide adequate support, especially with respect to mental health, to the LGBTQ population during future crises.

Submitted to arXiv on 19 May. 2022

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