Minority stress of LGBT+ youth in the context of education: integrative literature review

In addition to the general forms of stress characteristic of all students, LGBT+ people experience minority stress. The minority stress model represents general stress processes and minority stress processes. It is the minority stress processes that shape the lives of LGBT+ people, as they are based on gender and sexual orientation, that are characterized in this model as distal processes of minority stress. From these, proximal processes develop in response to distal stressors. With the aim of gaining a deeper understanding of this topic, presenting relevant foreign literature on the minority stress of LGBT+ persons in education, and creating the possibility of laying the foundations for empirical research in this area in Slovenia, we identified situations that represent a source of minority stress for LGBT+ persons in the context of the school environment. 57 materials from Scopus, Web of Science and COBISS+ databases were included in the integrative literature review, and 21 studies are presented in this paper, while the rest are mentioned in a separate paper due to the consideration of the related topic of resilience. The selected research addresses the topic of minority stress among LGBT+ individuals and includes young LGBT+ individuals and/or educationally relevant topics. All materials were reviewed with the Nvivo program and processed with qualitative content analysis. Some findings suggest that school spaces can represent a central source of distal (violence, discrimination, microaggressions, prejudice, stereotypes) and proximal (internalized stigma, anticipated rejection, stigma management) minority stressors for LGBT+ individuals. These have a number of negative effects on the lives and health of LGBT+ students, indicating the need for change to reduce minority stress levels and provide LGBT+ individuals with a safe and respectful educational experience.