Researching the Effects of Peer Pressure on LGBTQ+ Community

 Jessica Borowski, Verrazzano Class of 2020, completed a Major in Psychology BS 

        Being a Psychology major, I wanted my Capstone paper to relate to that subject in some manner. I spent a good part of my junior year dwelling on it, brainstorming idea after idea. One topic that I kept coming back to was peer pressure, and how people might feel the need to conform to social norms, such as gender roles. I thought about pressures to act a certain way and the effects it might have on an individual. This being a broad topic, it would be difficult to write a concise paper about something that affects the lives of so many people. It needed to be narrowed down to a specific group. My final topic became the impact that peer pressure has on LGBTQ+ high school students.

        The LGBTQ+ community is one that has been more accepted in recent years, but its members are still victims of homophobic and transphobic bullying. For those still in school, much of this discrimination comes from peers who struggle to accept sexualities that are not heterosexual, gender identities that are not cisgender (identifying with the gender a person is assigned at birth), or anything that goes against the ideas that society has impressed on them. I theorized that this attitude and the resulting bullying would have a negative impact on the victims. LGBTQ+ students report more peer pressure to change/conform and negative mental health symptoms than heterosexual and cisgender students.

One of the key points of my paper was that it was an intersectional study, meaning that it encompassed different experiences of LGBTQ+ people from all walks of life, including people of color, working-class people, and people from older, less-tolerant generations. When looking up articles, I had to be sure to choose the ones that covered each of these areas. It would not be enough to include only the stories of LGBTQ+ people who were white, middle/upper class, or from a more modern and accepting time period. All members of the community deserved to be represented. 

   This ended up being the greatest challenge of this project. It was more difficult than I thought it would be to find articles discussing the experiences of young LGBTQ+ people who were non-white, working class, and/or from older generations. I was able to find only a few sources that properly represented these minorities, but I found over twenty sources that discussed those who did not fall into those groups or did not account for those factors in the first place. This technically makes it possible for minorities to have been included in these studies, but there is no definitive way to tell for sure and no way to account for any differences between them and non-minorities. In the end, I was still able to find some support for my theory that LGBTQ+ students deal with more peer pressure and negative mental health symptoms than cisgender and heterosexual students. However, my paper was not nearly as representative as I would have liked it to be, and it was disappointing to see the lack of intersectional research. 

            This topic was such an interesting one to cover, and gaining insight on the mental health of LGBTQ+ adolescents and their contributing factors will help me once I start working as a mental health counselor.