What Helps Young Filipino LGBTQ+ Students Become Happier? Resilience, Mental Well-being, and Supportive Social Worlds
Article information
Cleofas, J. V. (2024). Communal and national resilience as predictors of happiness among young Filipino LGBTQ+ undergraduates: The mediating role of mental well-being. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 34(8), 1243–1259. https://doi.org/10.1080/10911359.2023.2265438
What this study is about
Many studies on LGBTQ+ mental health focus on risk: depression, anxiety, suicide, discrimination, stigma, and exclusion. These are important, but they do not tell the whole story. This study asks a more promotive question: What helps young LGBTQ+ people become happier?
The paper focuses on young Filipino LGBTQ+ undergraduates and examines whether two forms of collective resilience are connected to happiness:
- Communal resilience — resilience drawn from close social relationships, especially family and friends.
- National resilience — the sense that one’s society has solidarity, social justice, shared identity, and trustworthy public institutions.
The study also asks whether mental well-being explains these relationships. In everyday language: Do supportive communities and societies make LGBTQ+ youth happier because they first help them feel mentally well?
Why this matters
LGBTQ+ young people often face unequal mental health risks because of stigma, discrimination, and lack of protection based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression. In the Philippines, the paper notes that the country is often described as “tolerant,” but still lacks comprehensive national SOGIE-based legal protection. This creates a complicated environment: LGBTQ+ youth may experience acceptance in some spaces, but exclusion or vulnerability in others.
The paper shifts the conversation from “How do we reduce illness?” to “How do we create the social conditions that allow LGBTQ+ youth to live fuller, happier lives?”
The theoretical lens: capability approach
The study uses the capability approach, associated with Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. This approach asks what people are actually able to do and be in life. Happiness is treated as a form of achieved functioning: a sign that someone is living in ways they value.
In this framework:
- Collective resilience works like a social condition that can support or limit people’s possibilities.
- Mental well-being is treated as a human capability.
- Happiness is the achieved outcome or functioning.
The conceptual model in Figure 1 on page 6 shows this pathway clearly: communal and national resilience are positioned as social conversion factors, mental well-being as capability, and happiness as functioning.
What the researcher did
This was a cross-sectional mediation study using data from 340 LGBTQ+ Filipino undergraduate students aged 18–30. The respondents were selected from a larger post-lockdown student mental health project.
The survey measured:
- Communal resilience using the Multicultural Mastery Scale;
- National resilience using the Short National Resilience Scale;
- Mental well-being using the Short Warwick–Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale; and
- Happiness using the Subjective Happiness Scale.
According to Table 1 on page 9, most respondents were aged 18–20, assigned female at birth, bisexual or queer, and cisgender.
What the study found
1) Communal resilience predicted happiness
Young LGBTQ+ students who reported stronger communal resilience also reported higher happiness. This means that support from close social circles—especially family, friends, and trusted communities—may help LGBTQ+ youth feel happier.
This is not surprising, but it is important. For many LGBTQ+ youth, happiness is not only an individual psychological state. It is shaped by whether they have people who affirm them, help them cope, and make them feel they belong.
2) National resilience also predicted happiness
Students who felt more positively about national resilience—solidarity, social justice, trust, and national belonging—also tended to report higher happiness.
This finding matters because LGBTQ+ happiness is often discussed at the level of personal acceptance or family support. The study shows that the broader national environment matters too. A country’s laws, institutions, public attitudes, and social justice climate can shape whether LGBTQ+ youth feel safe, valued, and able to flourish.
3) Mental well-being predicted happiness
Mental well-being was strongly linked to happiness. Students with better mental well-being—feeling useful, able to cope, clear-thinking, connected, and optimistic—were more likely to report higher happiness.
This supports a simple but powerful point: happiness is not just about external success or temporary pleasure. It is deeply connected to positive mental health.
4) Mental well-being partly explained the communal resilience–happiness link
The mediation analysis found that mental well-being partially mediated the relationship between communal resilience and happiness. Specifically, mental well-being explained 36.84% of this relationship.
In plain language: supportive families, friends, and communities can make LGBTQ+ youth happier partly because they improve mental well-being first. But communal resilience also had a remaining direct effect on happiness. This means close social support may contribute to happiness in other ways too—such as belonging, identity affirmation, companionship, practical help, and everyday joy.
5) Mental well-being fully explained the national resilience–happiness link
The most interesting finding is that mental well-being fully mediated the relationship between national resilience and happiness.
This means that national resilience mattered for happiness mainly through mental well-being. In other words, a more just, trustworthy, inclusive, and solidaristic national environment may help LGBTQ+ youth become happier because it first helps protect or improve their mental health.
This is a very important policy insight: national-level conditions do not only affect abstract rights. They can shape young people’s psychological well-being, which then shapes their capacity to live happy lives.
6) The model explained meaningful variation
The model explained 23.1% of mental well-being and 31.5% of happiness among respondents. This suggests that collective resilience is not the whole story, but it is a meaningful part of the story.
Bottom line
This study shows that LGBTQ+ happiness is not simply a matter of personal optimism. It is shaped by the social worlds young people live in. Families, friends, communities, national institutions, social justice, and public trust all matter. But their effects are strongly connected to mental well-being.
For young Filipino LGBTQ+ undergraduates, happiness appears to grow not only from “being resilient” as individuals, but from living in environments that help them become mentally well.
Policy/practice recommendations
- Build LGBTQ+-affirming families and peer networks
Mental health programs should include family and peer support as part of LGBTQ+ youth care, when safe and consented to by the young person. - Treat mental well-being as a human capability
Schools and health practitioners should not only screen for depression or distress. They should actively cultivate positive mental health: belonging, usefulness, hope, coping, clear thinking, and social connection. - Monitor LGBTQ+ mental well-being during national crises
During crises such as pandemics, political unrest, disasters, or public debates on LGBTQ+ rights, schools and communities can conduct simple check-ins with LGBTQ+ students. - Strengthen school-based LGBTQ+ mental health promotion
Universities can create safe spaces, peer groups, counseling pathways, SOGIE-inclusive training, and affirming campus climates. - Advocate for national SOGIE protections
The study suggests that macro-level environments matter. Health and helping professionals can support policies that protect LGBTQ+ rights, reduce discrimination, and normalize equality. - Do not reduce resilience to individual toughness
Resilience should not mean telling LGBTQ+ youth to “just cope.” This study frames resilience as collective: families, friends, institutions, and national systems must also become more supportive.
Glossary of key terms
- LGBTQ+ — Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other sexual and gender minority identities.
- SOGIE — Sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression.
- Happiness — A person’s overall subjective sense of being happy or unhappy; treated in this study as an achieved life functioning.
- Mental well-being — Positive mental health, including feeling useful, able to deal with problems, connected to others, clear-thinking, and optimistic.
- Communal resilience — Resilience drawn from close interpersonal relationships and social groups, especially family and friends.
- National resilience — A person’s perception that their society can cope with adversity through solidarity, social justice, shared identity, and trust in institutions.
- Collective resilience — The capacity of groups, communities, or societies to prepare for, respond to, and recover from adversity.
- Capability approach — A framework that focuses on what people are actually able to do and be, and what social conditions help or prevent them from living meaningful lives.
- Functioning — In the capability approach, an achieved state of being or doing, such as being happy, healthy, educated, or socially included.
- Capability — A real opportunity or ability to achieve valued ways of living.
- Social conversion factors — Social conditions that help or hinder people from turning resources into valued outcomes.
- Mediation analysis — A statistical method that tests whether one variable explains the relationship between another predictor and an outcome.
- Partial mediation — A pattern where the predictor affects the outcome both directly and indirectly through a mediator.
- Full mediation — A pattern where the predictor affects the outcome mainly through the mediator.
- Multicultural Mastery Scale — The tool used in this study to measure communal resilience or mastery drawn from self, family, and friends.
- Short National Resilience Scale / NR-13 — A scale measuring perceived national resilience, including identity, solidarity, social justice, and trust in institutions.
- SWEMWBS — Short Warwick–Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale, used to measure positive mental well-being.
- Subjective Happiness Scale — A scale used to measure a person’s global subjective happiness.
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