Abstract
This article examines the resilient health information practices of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA+) individuals as agentic forms of buffering against minority stressors. Informed by semi- structured interviews with 30 LGBTQIA+ community leaders from South Carolina, our findings demonstrate how LGBTQIA+ individuals engage in resilient health information practices and community-based resilience. Further, our findings suggest that LGBTQIA+ communities integrate externally produced stressors. These findings have implications for future research on minority stress and resiliency strategies, such as shifting from outreach to engagement and leveraging what communities are doing, rather than assuming they are lacking. Further, as each identity and intersecting identities under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella has unique stressors and resilience strategies, our findings indicate how resilience strategies operate across each level of the socio-ecological model to better inform understanding of health information in context.
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Lookingbill, V., Vera, A.N., Wagner, T.L., Kitzie, V.L. (2021). “We Can Be Our Best Alliance”: Resilient Health Information Practices of LGBTQIA+ Individuals as a Buffering Response to Minority Stress. In: Toeppe, K., Yan, H., Chu, S.K.W. (eds) Diversity, Divergence, Dialogue. iConference 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12646. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71305-8_1
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