Lesbian, gay and bisexual young people are much less satisfied with life

The Department for Education (DfE) published a Statistical Bulletin comprising of data from the 2010 sweeps of the combined Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE) and the Youth Cohort Study (YCS) (Department for Education, 2011). For the first time, this publication contained data on those young people who identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) based on the LSYPE survey alone. Of the 51 published tables, five contained data specific to LGB respondents. This article extracts these data from across the published tables and brings them together to give a first analytic glimpse of how LGB youth’s experiences differ from their heterosexual counterparts in a number of key areas of life. The author calculated chi-square values in order to test the hypothesis that the differences between these groups were statistically significant. Differences in ‘satisfaction with life’ were found to be statistically significant whilst differences in risky sexual practices were not. These findings are discussed in this paper.