A Person-Centered, Multi-Method Examination of Disclosure, Campus Experiences, and Perceptions of Campus Climate for LGBTQ+ Students in the Southeastern United States

Abstract: LGBTQ+ students in higher education contexts continue to experience a range of hostile conditions. Increasingly, scholars have attended to the experiences and needs of these students, often emphasizing factors, such as visibility, outness/disclosure, and resilience. In this mixed-methods study of LGBTQ+ students attending colleges and public universities in the Southeastern region of the United States, we sought to examine how participants described their experiences. We began with hierarchical cluster analysis to describe the intra-individual patterns of responses to quantitative survey measures. We then engaged in qualitative analysis of open-ended responses to better understand participant experiences. The results point to outness and disclosure as complex, with racialized and gendered patterns of association to other campus experiences and outcomes. Our study concludes with implications for LGBTQ+ research in higher education contexts.