University of Arizona researchers will lead a project exploring how family support – or lack thereof – impacts the mental health and overall wellbeing of Latinx queer and transgender youth. 

Latinx is a gender-neutral term for those of Latin American descent.

The project is funded by a $2.6 million grant  from the National Institutes of Health awarded to the U of A, the University of Miami, the University of Florida and the University of Tennessee. The U of A's share is $1.5 million.

Russell Toomey, a professor in the U of A Norton School of Human Ecology whose work has focused on mental health and suicide prevention for LGBTQ youth, will lead the project with Karina Gattamorta from the University of Miami and Roberto Abreu from the University of Florida. 

Toomey said the project aims to address gaps in the research on LGBTQ youth and their families. Much of the existing literature has focused on white, non-Latinx families, which has resulted in recommendations and interventions that don't take culturally specific experiences into account, he said.

"Queer Latinx folks often experience high rates of racial and ethnic discrimination," Toomey said. "But we also want to consider cultural strengths, like the ways in which Latinx families appear to maintain closer, stronger bonds, even when parents might not fully embrace LGBTQ identities. We want to better understand those family dynamics so we can design better, culturally-informed interventions that translate to better mental health for whole families."

The five-year project will include Latinx families in Florida and Arizona, providing diversity that is a key element of the research, said Gattamorta, who studies health disparities among LGBTQ youth with a focus on racial and ethnic minorities.

"A lot of times in research, we tend to look at Latinx people like a monolith, as if their experiences are all the same," Gattamorta said. "In reality, there are a lot of differences – in immigration experiences, degrees of acculturation, where you come from and where you're living in the United States. An important part of this study is us being able to explore the role that those differences play in the acceptance process."

The project builds on years of previous research by the multi-university team. In past collaborations, the team developed a scale for exploring issues of LGBTQ acceptance and rejection that is specific to Latinx parents. In this project, the researchers plan to develop a parallel tool to assess how Latinx LGBTQ youth perceive and respond to parental acceptance or rejection.

"We know that acceptance by parents and caregivers is crucial to short- and long-term mental health outcomes for LGBTQ youth," said Abreu, a University of Florida expert on the relationships between Latinx LGBTQ people and their parents. "We've already developed a tool for the parents, and now we want to take the youth’s perspective into account, assess the mental health outcomes for the LGBTQ person, the parents and the family as a whole."

Norma Perez-Brena, an associate professor in the Norton School of Human Ecology who studies the protective effects of close family and cultural bonds for Latinx and immigrant adolescents, will lend her methodological expertise in assessing the family health implications of this type of family support.

"Using dyadic analysis, we will be able to examine these relationships from both directions," she explained. "Our scale will show both how the parent's acceptance or rejection impacts the LGBTQ youth and how the youth's perception of their parent's attitudes and support impacts how the parent feels about the relationship. It'll give us a more nuanced view of how these dynamics influence the overall well-being of the family unit."

That nuance has been lacking in the research to this point, said Kirsten Gonzalez, a University of Tennessee researcher on the project who specializes in psychological well-being of LGBTQ people of color.

"It's really important because we need to understand whether parents have an accurate sense of how they're supporting their youth and how their youth is receiving that support," she said. "We're trying to look at the concordance or discordance between how parents and LGBTQ youth perceive these relationship dynamics."

Ultimately, the research team hopes to use its findings to develop interventions that will support Latinx families in embracing and affirming LGBTQ youth. 

"We want to help families thrive," Toomey said.