LGBTQ+ involved intergroup and intragroup contact: evidence from Chinese social media

Intergroup contact between heterosexual and LGBTQ+ people and intragroup contact among LGBTQ+ individuals are key factors in improving social attitudes and facilitating peer support for sexual and gender minorities. However, due to geographical segregation and increasing political repression, opportunities for offline contact involving LGBTQ+ people are limited in China. Social media brings a crucial avenue for LGBTQ+ people to engage with their peers, and a data source for researchers to study their lives. My first study focuses on student dorms in Chinese colleges, which provides as-if randomly assigned opportunities for close contact between heterosexual and LGB roommates. To examine the impact of such contact on heterosexual people’s attitudes, I collected over 3,000 responses under relevant questions on Zhihu, the Chinese version of Quora. I developed a coding scheme to manually label key variables for each response and validated the labelling results with inter-coder reliability tests. My results show that instead of a unilateral increase in acceptance of LGB people, close contact polarizes heterosexual students’ attitudes toward LGB roommates. While negative contact is common, negative attitudes are less generalizable to LGB people in general than positive attitudes. I further identified three mechanisms that drive negative contact based on representative responses. The other two papers turn to intragroup contact within the LGBTQ+ community. Specifically, the second study examines the role of the collective LGBTQ+ identity in shaping the LGBTQ+ community from two perspectives: facilitating network connections and using LGBTQ+ common words. With a targeted crawling strategy, I identified 488 LGBTQ+ groups on Douban, the Chinese version of Reddit, and collected 1.07 million posts from over million users in these groups. I visualized the network among groups based on shared memberships and built a dictionary of LGBTQ+ common words. I found that Chinese LGBTQ+ people generally consider the collective LGBTQ+ identity to be secondary to their single-letter identities. Nevertheless, collective identity plays a central role in bringing together groups of different identities. Finally, the third study investigates how LGBTQ+ users produce and consume massive online information through collective efforts, based on over 1 million posts on Douban. I develop a theoretical framework to classify LGBTQ+ relevant content into six categories: identity knowledge, mutual aid, coming out, digital diaries, relationship seeking, and friendship seeking. I then apply structural topic models and keyword dictionaries to assign each post to these categories. I find significant heterogeneity across identities in publishing and responding to posts with different content. LGBTQ+ people show resilience in facing online censorship by strategically avoiding sensitive content and posting digital diaries. In addition to advancing new knowledge in LGBTQ+ studies, my research responds to some fundamental questions, including the effectiveness of close intergroup contact, navigating multiple identities, and constructing virtual communities under online censorship.