Personality across diverse sexual orientations and gender identities in an online convenience sample

Abstract

Sexual and gender minority participants (SGM) are underrepresented in quantitative psychology research overlooking a growing portion of the population. Previous research reports differences in personality between few categorical designations of gender and sexual orientation. The current study sought to expand the gender similarities hypothesis and characterize the feasibility of recruiting an SGM-diverse sample online. In preregistered analyses of 1,259 participants (73% identifying as SGM), we found that data quality was high, personality differences between groups were small overall (|d|_average = 0.16; |d|_range = 0–0.66), and there was substantial variability between facet-level group differences (|d| ± 0.59). We discuss implications for the attainability of diverse samples, group comparisons, and representativeness.