The role of the social environment in non-suicidal self-injury among LGBTQ youth: A mixed methods study

Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), such as cutting and burning, is a widespread social problem among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth. Extant research indicates that this population is more than twice as likely to engage in NSSI than heterosexual and cisgender (non-transgender) youth. Despite the scope of this social problem, it remains relatively unexamined in the literature. Research on other risk behaviors among LGBTQ youth indicates that experiencing homophobia and transphobia in key social contexts such as families, schools, and peer relationships contributes to health disparities among this group. Consequently, the aims of this study were to examine: (1) the relationship between LGBTQ youth's social environments and their NSSI behavior, and (2) whether/how specific aspects of the social environment contribute to an understanding of NSSI among LGBTQ youth. This study was conducted using an exploratory, sequential mixed methods design with two phases. The first phase of the study involved analysis of transcripts from interviews conducted with 44 LGBTQ youth recruited from a community-based organization. In this phase, five qualitative themes were identified: (1) Violence; (2) Misconceptions, Stigma, and Shame; (3) Negotiating LGBTQ Identity; (4) Invisibility and Isolation; and (5) Peer Relationships. Results from the qualitative phase were used to identify key variables and specify statistical models in the second, quantitative, phase of the study, using secondary data from a survey of 252 LGBTQ youth. The qualitative phase revealed how LGBTQ youth, themselves, described the role of the social environment in their NSSI behavior, while the quantitative phase was used to determine whether the qualitative findings could be used to predict engagement in NSSI among a larger sample of LGBTQ youth. The quantitative analyses found that certain social-environmental factors such as experiencing physical abuse at home, feeling unsafe at school, and greater openness about sexual orientation significantly predicted the likelihood of engaging in NSSI among LGBTQ youth. Furthermore, depression partially mediated the relationships between family physical abuse and NSSI and feeling unsafe at school and NSSI. The qualitative and quantitative results were compared in the interpretation phase to explore areas of convergence and incongruence. Overall, this study's findings indicate that social-environmental factors are salient to understanding NSSI among LGBTQ youth. The particular social contexts in which LGBTQ youth live significantly influence their engagement in this risk behavior. These findings can inform the development of culturally relevant NSSI interventions that address the social realities of LGBTQ youth's lives.

The Keyes to Reclaiming the Racial History Of the Roberts Court

This article advocates for a fundamental re-understanding about the way that the history of race is understood by the current Supreme Court. Represented by the racial rights opinions of Justice John Roberts that celebrate racial progress, the Supreme Court has equivocated and rendered obsolete the historical experiences of people of color in the United States. This jurisprudence has in turn reified the notion of color-blindness, consigning racial discrimination to a distant and discredited past that has little bearing to how race and inequality is experienced today. The racial history of the Roberts Court is centrally informed by the context and circumstances surrounding Brown v. Board of Education. For the Court, Brown symbolizes all that is wrong with the history of race in the United States - legal segregation, explicit racial discord, and vicious and random acts of violence. Though Roberts Court opinions suggest that some of those vestiges still exits, the bulk of its jurisprudence indicate the opposite. With Brown’s basic factual premises as its point of reference, the Court has consistently argued that the nation has made tremendous strides away from the condition of racial bigotry, intolerance, and inequity. The article accordingly argues that the Roberts Court reliance on Brown to understand racial progress is anachronistic. Especially as the nation’s focus for racial inequality turned national in scope, the same binaries in Brown that had long served to explain the history of race relations in the United States (such as Black-White, North-South, and Urban-Rural) were giving way to massive multicultural demographic and geographic transformations in the United States in the years and decades after World War II. All of the familiar tropes so clear in Brown and its progeny could no longer fully describe the current reality of shifting and transforming patterns of race relations in the United States. In order to reclaim the history of race from the Roberts Court, the article assesses a case that more accurately symbolizes the recent history and current status of race relations today: Keyes v. School District No. 1. This was the first Supreme Court case to confront how the binaries of cases like Brown proved of little probative value in addressing how and in what ways race and racial discrimination was changing in the United States. Thus, understanding Keyesand the history it reflects reveals much about how and in what ways the Roberts Court should rethink its conclusions regarding the history of race relations in the United States for the last 60 years.

Leading Safety Indicators: Proactively Monitoring Safety Performance

Traditional measures or indicators of workplace safety performance reflect unrecognized hazards, unsafe conditions, reckless behavior, and other safety program shortcomings only after a worker is injured or falls ill. In contrast to traditional or lagging indicators, leading indicators can predict poor safety performance to ensure that safety program failings are addressed before an occupational injury or illness actually occurs. This Capstone Project identified a variety of proactive safety management practices, policies, and activities shown to have a positive impact on workplace safety as leading safety indicators. The end result is a comprehensive framework of leading safety indicators that employers can use to proactively gauge safety program performance and address unrecognized hazards, unsafe conditions, reckless behavior, and other safety program deficiencies.