Personality across diverse sexual orientations and gender identities in an online convenience sample
Year: 2024
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Sexual and gender minority (SGM) participants are generally underrepresented in quantitative psychology research. This affects the external validity of past research and overlooks a growing portion of the world’s population. The current study sought to characterize the feasibility of recruiting an SGM-diverse sample online by surveying personality and sexuality measures on the Reddit social media platform. Previous surveys report differences in the Big Five between limited categorical designations of gender and sexual orientation (e.g., excluding asexual or nonbinary people) and estimated at the level of factors, rather than finer-grained facets. Narrow categorical data cannot address whether differences represent distinct group characteristics or reflect broader patterns shared across members of diverse marginalized groups. In preregistered analyses of 1,259 participants (73% identifying as SGM), we explored several questions to evaluate the use of online convenience samples from social media. Personality differences between groups were small overall (|d|average= 0.16; |d|range = 0 - 0.66) and there was substantial variability between facet-level group differences (|d| ± 0.59). Measurement equivalence was not supported, so these differences are not interpretable in the way comparative psychology seeks. We discuss implications for the attainability of diverse samples, representativeness, and population trends as well as suggestions for improving our sampling demographics.
Institution: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,730
OpenAlex ID: W4391426037