Sexual minority orientation is associated with greater psychological impact due to the COVID-19 crisis—evidence from a longitudinal cohort study of young Swiss men
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article has been publish in Frontiers in Public Health: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2021.692884The COVID-19 pandemic and its countermeasures may have had a significant impact on the psychological well-being of specific population subgroups. The present study investigated whether sexual minority men from an ongoing cohort study of young Swiss men experienced different psychological impacts, levels of substance use and addictive behaviours. MethodsAn ongoing cohort sample based on the general population of young Swiss men (mean age=29.07 years; SD=1.27) was assessed before and during the COVID-19 crisis for depression, stress, sleep quality, substance use and addictive behaviours. Additionally, during the crisis, we assessed its impact in form of fear, isolation and traumatic experiences. Potential associations between these outcomes and sexual orientation (sexual minority vs heterosexual) were tested using linear regression models. ResultsCompared to heterosexual men, sexual minority men showed higher levels of psychological trauma (b=0.37 [0.25, 0.49]), fear (b=0.18 [0.06, 0.30]) and isolation (b=0.32 [0.20, 0.44]) due to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as higher levels of depression (b=0.31 [0.20, 0.41]) and lower sleep quality (b=-0.13 [-0.24, -0.02]) during the crisis. These differences were to a large degree explained by higher pre-crisis levels of mental health problems and the personality dimension of neuroticism-anxiety. Sexual minority men showed higher overall levels of substance use and addictive behaviours, but these differences were already present before the crisis.ConclusionThe COVID-19 crisis may have worsened pre-existing vulnerabilities in sexual minority men, leading to its greater psychological impact on them than on heterosexual men. Services offering psychological support to sexual minorities may need to be reinforced during crises.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".