Gender Expression and its Association with Health in the Youth Risk Behavior Survey of Adolescents

• In Event: 3550 - Emerging Issues in Adolescent and Young Adult Health Risks and Behaviors

Abstract

The measurement of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) in surveys has gained increasing interest among survey practitioners and academic researchers, in order to reliably and validly measure the full scope of human experience as well as to enumerate and account for the range of issues surrounding some of the more vulnerable and marginalized populations in society.

Best practices for asking SOGI questions have been collected and reported by a variety of working groups and researchers. In each of these sets of materials, the general consensus is that the best practice recommendations are preliminary and incomplete, requiring rigorous empirical examination across a range of populations and survey conditions. Additionally, much of the focus in extant research is on the questions that explicitly focus on gender identity and sexual identity. There is comparably little research focused on gender expression, which is also a key feature of how gender is lived and experienced with implications for well-being and life chances.

I use the current “best practice” version of a survey question on gender expression in the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (2013, 2015, 2017) and examine how gender expression is associated with various measures of mental health and well-being, both net of and varying by gender identity and sexual identity. The results of this study suggest the importance of incorporating measures of gender expression in surveys in order to more fully capture the relationship between gender and health in survey research.

Author

• Dana Garbarski, Loyola University Chicago