INQYR @ SSWR 2025

School-based civic engagement programs seek to promote youth-led efforts to improve school climate, with the purpose of promoting youth civic development, policy improvements, and school climate benefits for all students. Youth leadership programs position youth as experience experts and interventionists, yet facilitators and barriers to youth-led advocacy have been largely unexamined. This study links social justice youth development (SJYD) literature with implementation research to examine student-reported factors that shape LGBTQA advocacy in schools in Los Angeles.

Black people face unique stressors related to mental health, especially considering the impact of historical trauma, systemic racism, and social inequality. For Black LGBTQ individuals, often encountering discrimination and prejudice from the broader society and within identity-based communities, research has shown that participating in, and belonging to, a supportive identity-based community can promote positive mental health outcomes in the face of challenges related to their intersectional identities. Attending to the complexity of community for Black LGBTQ individuals as racial, sexual, and gender minorities, this study explored their experiences with Black, LGBTQ, and Black LGBTQ communities, including factors that facilitate or hinder their access and connection to these communities, in an effort to garner important insights about the role of community in their lives.

Given the vulnerable position faced by gay, bisexual, and queer (GBQ) men in Singapore, there is an opportunity to explore interventions that can significantly impact and empower them, providing a sense of community and strategies to navigate their daily challenges. With its emphasis on critically engaging tools in group work settings, Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) offers a robust approach that could potentially pave the way for the adoption of applied theatre interventions within local social service settings, particularly those serving the LGBTQ+ population. This research thus endeavors to scrutinize the impact of TO on the levels of critical consciousness among GBQ men in Singapore using a mixed-method design.

This scoping review explores the profound impacts of violence and discrimination on the LGBTQ+ youth community, a topic extensively addressed in numerous studies. These impacts often manifest as psychosocial stress, feelings of isolation, and increased rates of self-harm among LGBTQ+ youths. Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) is a community-based intervention that has garnered interest for its potential to empower marginalized communities and heighten consciousness about systemic issues such as violence and discrimination. Within the context of the LGBTQ+ community, TO has emerged as a tool for not only raising awareness but also fostering dialogue and facilitating meaningful engagement with issues of violence and discrimination.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other gender and sexual minority (LGBTQ+) individuals continue to experience discrimination, including in sport. Nevertheless, some LGBTQ+ people find refuge through sport. LGBTQ+ focused community sport clubs have recently emerged to provide safe spaces for LGBTQ+ adults to benefit from sport participation. There are possibilities that LGBTQ+ community sport participation may strengthen community connectedness and positively influence identity development, both of which are protective factors for LGBTQ+ people. Yet, little research exists about participation in LGBTQ+ focused community sport. Thus, the purpose of this scoping review was to collate and summarize the empirical and grey literature related to LGBTQ+ focused community sport involvement.

This scoping review explores the profound impacts of violence and discrimination on the LGBTQ+ youth community, a topic extensively addressed in numerous studies. These impacts often manifest as psychosocial stress, feelings of isolation, and increased rates of self-harm among LGBTQ+ youths. Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) is a community-based intervention that has garnered interest for its potential to empower marginalized communities and heighten consciousness about systemic issues such as violence and discrimination. Within the context of the LGBTQ+ community, TO has emerged as a tool for not only raising awareness but also fostering dialogue and facilitating meaningful engagement with issues of violence and discrimination.

Social work is grounded in a mandate for competent and culturally relevant practice, but meaningfully developing and assessing these competencies in social work curricula remains a challenge. Specifically, there is an increasing educational demand for culturally and community grounded approaches to support practice competence with a diverse range of clients. However, there is lack of guidance on organizational research processes for guiding such social work curricular reform, resulting in siloed reform practices that may diminish their impacts. Guided by an overarching ‘top-down, bottom-up’ change management methodology, combining community consultation on needs with transparent and participatory change stewardship (Pietarinen et al., 2016), we studied practice demands for core competencies in mental health and health (MHH), co-generated a competency framework and analyzed student assessment of competency acquistion through the MSW MHH specialization curriculum.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other sexual and/or gender minority (LGBTQ+) youth are often challenged by anti-LGBTQ+ microaggressions (i.e., subtle forms of prejudice and discrimination). Microaggressions take on many forms, including homophobic and transphobic language and behaviors; exoticization of LGBTQ+ identities; and assumptions that all LGBTQ+ people have the same experiences. With the widespread growth of high-speed and mobile internet access, anti-LGBTQ+ microaggressions are becoming more prevalent online. This is concerning, given prejudice and discrimination negatively influence health and well-being. However, there is a lack of knowledge related to the impacts of digital microaggressions on LGBTQ+ youth. Therefore, this study examined the perceived impacts of digital microaggressions among LGBTQ+ youth and investigated the relationships between digital microaggressions, stress, and well-being.

Sexual minority adolescents consistently report greater mental health inequities compared to their heterosexual peers. One of the driving explanations for these inequities is the presence of homophobic and heterosexist social environments. Literature suggests within-group heterogeneity in health equities and experiences based on membership to other minoritized social identities and experiences. For example, non-affirming cultural environments (religious, racial/ethnic) may exacerbate stressors and contribute to negative mental health outcomes. Despite this knowledge interplay of multiple social identities, current literature is limited in understanding on the relationship between racial/ethnic identification, non-affirming cultural environments, and mental health outcomes among sexual minority adolescents.

Voices of Youth Count estimates that 1 in 10 youth ages 18 to 24 experience homelessness in any given year. Evidence suggests homelessness is increasing nationally with rising costs of housing and stagnant wage increases. Subpopulations facing additional barriers to maintaining stable housing such as LGBTQ+ youth, youth of color, and pregnant/parenting youth, are overrepresented among youth experiencing homelessness. Research evidence has deepened understanding of factors and mechanisms that are causes and consequences of homelessness for youth, as well as challenges experienced in navigating systems. Much less research evidence exists on interventions that are promising solutions for communities seeking to end youth homelessness.

Federal guidance highlights aspects of successful community responses to youth homelessness, including youth engagement in leadership, a housing first and positive youth development approach, and attention to the needs of subpopulations disproportionately impacted by homelessness. This study focuses on a youth shared housing program model that was designed over the course of a year by youth with lived experience expertise, community providers and university researchers, specifically for LGBTQ+ youth, pregnant/parenting youth, and youth at the intersection. The model centers around a co-created set of values and commitments used to guide implementation. This study explored ways in which values informed the program as well as barriers and facilitators to upholding them during implementation. The goal of the study is to identify essential elements of a values-based housing program model to aid transferability to other community contexts.

Queer individuals exist in a state of contention and politicization in the US due to their contravening nature against traditionalist concepts of heteronormativity and cisnormativity. With more than 650 anti-LGBTQ+ bills being filed in state legislatures in 2023 alone, the oppression of queer individuals has become a byproduct of partisan politics in the US. Influences on the individual perceptions of structural stigma in queer adults in the US has yet to be examined. This study aims to close this gap by examining the relationship between exposure to pro- and anti-queer environmental factors during childhood and perceptions of structural stigma in queer adults

Queer people in the United States are currently being subjected to increasing rates of systematic oppression and discrimination. Various approaches to address this have been proposed ranging from individual level mindfulness practices to complete systemic overhaul. History has often shown that socio-political, activism approaches often achieve legislative change often in the forms of added protections for marginalized communities or the repealing of harmful legislation. Participation rates within socio-political movements are likely impacted by various factors of which remain unknown within queer communities. The purpose of this study was to examine what influences queer people to engage in activism based on (1) sociodemographic factors (i.e., gender identity, sex, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, education level, religion, socioeconomic status, immigrant status, and disability status), (2) mental health factors (i.e., depressive symptoms, generalized anxiety symptoms, queer identity concealment, sexual minority stress, and stressful life events), and (3) environmental factors (i.e., homophobic messaging received during childhood, familial political ideology during childhood, and state of residence).

A growing number of social work scholars are employing and uplifting participatory research methods in their scholarship. Participatory methods, such as participatory action research (PAR), community-based participatory research (CBPR), and critical participatory action research (CPAR), work to partner with individuals and communities impacted by social conditions to work towards changing them (Vaughn & Jacquez, 2020). Participatory work explicitly subverts the historically positivist underpinnings of social work and social science scholarship; the growth of these methods suggest a shift in the social work field toward increasingly critical and community-engaged scholarship (Littman et al., 2023). However, many social work institutions are not prepared to meaningfully embrace participatory research when hiring and conducting tenure and promotion reviews. Such reviews often rely on metrics most aligned with positivist research methods (e.g., amount of funding, number of publications), whereas participatory methods are guided by slow, intentional, and non-linear collaborations and likely to result in different dissemination methods (e.g., community reports, community presentations, policy advocacy, social change).

Social work research is increasingly utilizing social media-based recruitment and online surveys to access hard-to-reach and stigmatized study populations (Archer-Kuhn et al., 2021). However, there is growing scholarly concern about survey bots, automated programs designed by bad actors to respond to surveys and farm incentives, which impact data integrity (Storozuk, 2020). A slew of recent studies in social work and allied social sciences has documented survey bot incursions that have wasted limited research funds and, in some cases, resulted in termination of the study (Bybee et al., 2022; Coulter-Thompson et al., 2023; Griffin et al., 2021; Shaw et al., 2022; Sterzing et al., 2018). Sharing effective approaches to dealing with survey bots increases awareness of and capacity to manage this risk and may support the development of new data cleaning strategies to tackle this issue. This study therefore offers a collaborative systematic coding approach to identifying and excluding bot data from an international online survey sample using rigorous processes to enhance data trustworthiness.

Transgender and nonbinary (TGNB) youth and young adults (YYA) experience multiple barriers to wellbeing. Much research on TGNB YYA centers negative outcomes that are often the result of structural barriers, informing interventions primarily oriented toward outcomes like decreased anxiety/depression and suicide prevention. Emerging literature explores resilience and resistance among TGNB YYA, finding connection to TGNB community as critically important.

This study was co-designed with a resilience-focused virtual mentoring program for TGNB YYA. We explore three research questions: (1) what factors facilitate or hinder the relationship and community building between and among TGNB mentors and mentees in a virtual mentoring program? (2) with what impact? and (3) how do TGNB mentees think about the role of resilience in the context of a mentoring program?

This study delves into the experiences of sexual and gender diverse (SGD) individuals in roller derby, with a focus on how this participation disrupts social exclusion and discrimination and contributes to mental health and well-being. It seeks to inform social work practices and policies that validate and celebrate the resilience and joy inherent in SGD and trans and gender diverse (TGD) lives, contributing to the broader discourse of social justice. As an arena historically challenging gender and sexual norms, roller derby stands as an opportunity for social justice, embodying the principles of sexual and gender inclusion and diversity. It’s potential as a protective platform for SGD athletes against minority stressors, highlights sports as a catalyze for progressive social change. This study explores how roller derby can transcend the sporting context to influence social work policies and practices aimed at uprooting discrimination and fostering wellbeing among SGD populations.