Reconciling associations between minority stress and sexual minority romantic relationship functioning

Abstract

Cao et al. (2017) conducted a meta-analysis of the association between sexual minority stress and relationship well-being. Having published a similar meta-analysis (Doyle and Molix, 2015b), we were struck by a number of important similarities as well as critical differences in these two reviews, as other authors working on minority stress and sexual minority romantic relationship functioning have also been recently (e.g., Ballester et al., 2021; Vale and Bisconti, 2021). Here we aim to reconcile discrepant findings with regard to conceptual and methodological differences between the two reviews. Additionally, we aim to contribute to a broader discussion of understanding overlapping meta-analytic reviews (Siontis et al., 2013; Helfer et al., 2015). In order to integrate findings from these two reviews, for illustrative purposes we began by conducting a second-order meta-analysis using the psychmeta package in R (Dahlke and Wiernik, 2018). For reasons discussed in detail later, we conducted a “bare bones” second-order meta-analysis using uncorrected first-order meta-analysis estimates weighted by the number of primary studies included (Schmidt and Oh, 2013), shown in Table 1. Overall, the combined estimate of the effect of minority stress on sexual minority relationship functioning across these two meta-analyses was small but statistically significant, r = −0.144, 95% CI (−0.157, −0.132), echoing the importance of understanding minority stress processes for research on sexual minority romantic relationships. We continue to refer to the results of our “bare bones” second-order meta-analysis as we discuss similarities and differences in the two reports.