Development and Preliminary Trial of a Brief, Portable Health Intervention for Rural Sexual Minority Emerging Adults

The EW intervention will utilize the procedures piloted earlier with gay and bisexual male college students in urban and rural regions of the US. In this condition, participants will be instructed to write for 20 minutes across three consecutive days in a free-form manner about the most stressful or traumatic LGB-related event that they have encountered.

The SA intervention will ask participants to read a brief description, over the course of 3 consecutive days, of a (hypothetical) LGB youth who is facing minority stress. Each day's description will contain a different LGB youth facing a different stigma-related stressor derived from Phase 1 and 2 interviews. Participants will then be asked to write a letter for 20 minutes to advise the LGB youth how best to cope with minority stress drawing on their personal experiences.

Participants randomly assigned to the control condition will be asked to write about what they have done since waking up that morning for 20 minutes across 3 consecutive days. This control matches the time and activity of the EW and SA arms and has been implemented across dozens of EW and SA studies.