Two Decades of LGBTQ Relationships Research – Psychology Today

In 2014, I attended the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology—one of the largest annual social psychology conferences. The conference covers a wide range of topics and one of the sub-areas is Close Relationships, which hosts a wonderful pre-conference each year leading up to the larger event. As I found myself strolling through the poster presentations for this section of the conference, I began to notice that most of them were reporting the results of research conducted with mixed-sex and presumably heterosexual couples. The pattern became so apparent that I decided to review each poster a bit more systematically and to ask the presenters some standard questions about the demographics of their samples. I was able to visit 58 of the 71 posters listed on the program for the Close Relationships section—there were quite a few posters missing due to a horrendous winter storm that made the annual trip to SPSP impossible for many. Of the posters reviewed, only 15.5% included LGBTQ participants and only one study specifically focused on LGBTQ relationships. Following the conference, I wrote an article for the Relationships Research Newsletter published by the International Association for Relationships Research discussing the “state of LGBTQ-inclusive research methods” in the field of relationship science.

The following year, a somewhat more systematic approach to evaluating the inclusion of sexual minority couples in research was undertaken by Judith Andersen and Christopher Zou, who published their findings in the Health Science Journal. Their analysis focused on the inclusion of sexual minority couples in research relevant to relationships and health and they focused on publications indexed by Medline and PsychINFO between 2002-2012. Their results indicated that a striking 88.7% of the studies reviewed had excluded sexual minority couples from participating—meaning that even fewer of the papers in their sample were inclusive than my snapshot of the posters presented during the 2014 Close Relationships Poster Session.

Fast forward nearly another decade and the International Association for Relationship Research decided to launch two special issues of their flagship journals, Personal Relationships and the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, dedicated to reviewing the last two decades of relationship science. Along with two other leading researchers in the area of LGBTQ+ relationships, I was invited to write a review focused on LGBTQ+ relationship science. The burning question in my mind was whether or not we would see a stark increase in inclusion as time progressed. After all, the two decades spanning 2002-2022 represent a time of significant advancements for LGBTQ+ civil rights, particularly those related to the legal recognition of same-sex relationships.

What Is the State of LGBTQ Inclusion in Relationships Research Today?

To answer this question, we gathered every single article published in Personal Relationships (PR) and the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (JSPR) starting in 2002 until April 2021. This resulted in 2,181 articles; 1,392 articles from JPSR and 789 from PR. We used a variety of coding techniques, including automatic keyword coding and manual screening of articles, to identify which articles contained any information relevant to LGBTQ+ identities and relationships. Roughly 85.8% of these articles were excluded from further analysis as they did not contain any words relevant to sexual or gender minority identities or relationships. The remaining 329 articles were manually coded to identify how they handled issues related to sexual and gender identity. Some articles mentioned LGBTQ+ issues in their limitations section (n = 58), for example to state that future research should consider testing similar questions with a more inclusive and diverse sample. Another 42 articles explicitly stated that they excluded LGBTQ+ participants from their recruitment or analysis process, and while this may seem harsh, it still reflects a methodological improvement over the 1,852 articles that did not even provide adequate information to understand how the exclusion process took place. Some studies did include LGBTQ+ participants in their recruitment process and analyses, but often the sample sizes were small, meaning that no further efforts were taken to understand whether LGBTQ+ participants had unique experiences.

Ultimately, of the 2,181 articles published in these two journals between 2002 and April 2021, 92 articles, or 4.2%, presented LGBTQ-relevant information that we considered capable of providing empirical evidence concerning the lives and experiences of sexual and gender minorities within the context of close relationships. Thus, with only 4.2% of the articles being LGBTQ-relevant, our review of two decades of relationship science research did not seem to suggest that great improvement was occurring over time.

Has LGBTQ Inclusion Increased Over Time?

However, when we broke our data down into smaller periods, we did see a slight indication of improvement over time for the general inclusion of LGBTQ+ participants in relationship science published in these two journals. For example, research published in Personal Relationships climbed from roughly 2% of articles being LGBTQ-relevant between 2002 and 2006 to a peak of just over 4% in 2012-2015, a rate that either slightly decreased or remained constant for the final five-year period, 2016-2021. The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships had a somewhat higher inclusion rate over time, with roughly 3.5% of articles in 2002-2006 being LGBTQ-relevant, peaking at nearly 6% between 2007-2011, and then settling back between 4% and 5% for the periods ranging from 2012-2015 and 2016-2021. Despite these slight differences, overall, there was no significant difference between the proportion of articles considered LGBTQ-relevant in each of the two journals reviewed.

Additional Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion

Most of the research in the review that was deemed “LGBTQ-relevant” tended to explore the LGBTQ+ community as a whole, rather than presenting studies that specifically explored the experiences of one identity group or another (e.g., lesbian women vs. gay men). Only one of the 92 articles exclusively focused on the experiences of bisexual individuals and 54.3% of the LGBTQ-relevant articles did not include bisexuals in their sample at all. The overall body of research also had an androcentric slant, such that 17.4% of the articles focused exclusively on sexual minority men while only 9.8% focused exclusively on sexual minority women.

Finally, although our interest was in exploring relationship science that was considered relevant to LGBTQ+ populations, a better descriptor would be LGBQ, as very few of the studies included transgender, non-binary, or gender-diverse relationship experiences. In total, 15 articles included transgender participants while only four included non-binary participants.

LGBTQ+ Specific Journals

Of course, this review focused on two of the leading relationship science journals and thus did not cover research published in other journals. Anecdotally, many researchers working in LGBTQ psychology and related areas note that when they try to publish in mainstream journals, reviewers often recommend that they send their LGBTQ-relevant research to more specialized, niche journals. Thus, there is likely more research on LGBTQ+ relationship experiences in journals such as Psychology & Sexuality, LGBT Health, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Journal of Homosexuality, and the APA Journal of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity. However, none of these journals specifically focus on relationship science and may not be widely read by other scholars studying relationships specifically. While one of the benefits of LGBTQ-inclusive research is that it helps us to better understand the experiences within this specific population, such research also benefits the wider population, as often LGBTQ-inclusive research suggests new and novel questions that help to shed light on relationship experiences that are relevant to all individuals, regardless of sexual or gender identity.

Despite the indication that there is still a long way to go in terms of encouraging broad inclusion of LGBTQ+ experiences in mainstream relationship research, there were still many positive signs. The overall trajectory of inclusion appears to be increasing over time, conferences are beginning to include specific programming on how to increase the inclusivity of relationship research, and the editors of the special issues celebrating the past two decades of relationship science saw fit to include a review that was specific to LGBTQ+ relationship experiences. The review concluded by noting that we, the authors, were “looking forward to the next 20 years” of LGBTQ-inclusive relationship research, with a specific “focus on deciphering the minutiae of all the colourful intersection of identity that make up the true richness of human relationships.”

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