Racist and homophobic norms are a key aspect of structural racism and homophobia that have an entrenched association with place, to produce health inequities. According to their recent paper, “Structural racism and homophobia evaluated through social media sentiment combined with activity spaces and associations with mental health among young sexual minority men,” Drs. Stephanie Cook, Dustin Duncan (co-first authors) and colleagues found that the effects of discrimination can vary by race/ethnicity and discrimination type. Black and White young sexual minority men (YSMM) reported significantly more poor mental health days in comparison to Hispanic YSMM. They further found that experiencing place-based negative racial sentiment may have implications for mental well-being among young sexual minority men regardless of race/ethnicity.
In this paper, the research team investigates how the cultural milieu that influences place, institutions, and policies, can be examined through the lived experience of individuals using geo-spacial devices and social media data. They used a place-based approach to assess the structural forces that impact structural racism and its influence on a communities health and mental well being by disaggregating the number of racist/homophobic Tweets by place using a series of spatial grids. They look specifically at experiences of racism, homophobia, and discrimination using social media as a proxy for the localized climate, along with activity space measures to generate measures of exposure to race- and sexual orientation-based structural discrimination based on spaces frequented and assess its relation to mental health of young sexual minority men.
The authors found that spending time in more racist spaces was associated with significantly more days of poor mental health. Findings also suggest that Hispanic YSMM have lower days of poorer mental health compared to White and Black YSMM when spending moderate to heavy time in spaces of higher negative racial climate. However, when spending time in spaces lower in a negative racial climate, Hispanic YSMM have slightly more days of poor mental health compared to White and Black YSMM. While their novel approach uncovered new insights into the ways area-based and individual-level factors influence mental health, more research is needed to better understand intersectional influences of structural discrimination in mental health among YSMM.
Stephanie Cook, is a research affiliate at NYU’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change and Assistant Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences and of Biostatistics at the NYU School of Global Public Health. She collaborated with Dustin T. Duncan, Erica P. Wood, Seann D. Regan, Basile Chaix, Yijun Tian, and Rumi Chunara on this paper, which has been published in March 2023’s edition of the Social Science & Medicine journal.
The article can be cited as follows:
Dustin T. Duncan, Stephanie H. Cook, Erica P. Wood, Seann D. Regan, Basile Chaix, Yijun Tian, Rumi Chunara, Structural racism and homophobia evaluated through social media sentiment combined with activity spaces and associations with mental health among young sexual minority men, Social Science & Medicine, Volume 320, 2023, 115755, ISSN 0277-9536, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.115755.
