Skyler Jackson
Yale University, CT·Public Health & Epidemiology
Many of the categories societies treat as fundamental come in pairs: man or woman, Black or White, gay or straight. People whose identities fall between those pairs, described here as border identity groups, include bisexual and pansexual (bi+) people, Biracial and Multiracial people, and gender nonbinary people.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Psychology
Social Science
- Topics
border identity stress
bisexual
pansexual
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2031
What they work on
- Develop a community-informed multigroup scale of border identity stress that functions equivalently across bi+, Multiracial, and gender nonbinary adults and is suited to cross-sectional, longitudinal, and ecological momentary assessment HIV research.
- Test longitudinally a unified model linking border identity stress to HIV risk and mental health problems across bi+, Multiracial, and nonbinary adults, evaluating theorized mediators and moderators in each group.
- Identify mutable mechanisms and protective factors that strengthen or buffer the relationship between border identity stress and co-occurring sexual and mental health risks.
- Track daily links between border identity stressors, HIV risk factors, and mental health symptoms in three higher-risk border identity subgroups through a 14-day microlongitudinal study.
- Disseminate findings in plain-language formats to research participants, AIDS service organizations in Ending the HIV Epidemic priority jurisdictions, and a national network of mental health providers.
More about the research
These are fast-growing parts of the U.S. population, and research finds they carry higher HIV and mental health risk not only than majority groups but also than the minority groups they are often lumped in with: bi+ people fare worse than monosexual sexual minorities, Multiracial people than monoracial minorities, nonbinary people than binary transgender people. Why remains poorly theorized and poorly measured.
Why it matters
Bi+, Multiracial, and gender nonbinary adults are large, growing, and disproportionately burdened by HIV and co-occurring mental health problems, yet no shared measure or model exists to explain why. A validated border identity stress scale and evidence on which daily processes link stigma to risk could give prevention programs and mental health providers concrete, modifiable targets, and could change how the field measures stigma and decides which stigmatized groups to analyze together.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Robert Rosales
Brown University, RI·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Assess the acceptability and feasibility of ecological momentary assessment (EMA) measures of social stress, alcohol use and protective factors among Hispanic and white LGB youth, using cognitive interviews and a two-week pilot.
Peng Wang
Yale University, CT·Psychology
Generate an initial pool of items measuring daily intersectional stigma, drawing on prior research and semi-structured interviews with 20 Black people with disabilities and 10 content experts.
Jonathan Kunstman
Auburn University, AL·Psychology
Test whether daily experiences of racial discrimination increase social pain minimization (having one's emotional pain dismissed) and sleep problems in Black American adults, using ecological momentary assessment and actigraphy.
The school
Yale University: 73 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
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