About

Dr. Brian Dodge is a Professor in the Department of Health Promotion Sciences at the University of Arizona Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health and serves as the Director of the University of Arizona LGBTQ+ Institute. His academic background includes undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan and graduate studies at Indiana University, followed by a postdoctoral research fellowship at the HIV Center for Clinical & Behavioral Studies at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. His research focuses on health among sexual and gender minority populations across a wide range of global contexts. Dr. Dodge has authored and co-authored over 200 scientific publications and has served as Principal Investigator on some of the first NIH-funded research projects specifically addressing health among bisexual individuals. He is dedicated to teaching and learning from students, traveling with family and friends, and collaborating with marginalized communities to improve health and well-being.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Family medicine
• Gerontology
• Psychology
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Demography
• Clinical psychology
• Nursing

Selected publications

• Where does risk emerge? A comparative look at sexual exploitation across queer, trans and cisgender heterosexual populations in the US

  Journal of Sexual Aggression · 2026-04-08

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Examining Sexual Exploitation in a National US Sample of LGBTQ+ Individuals Using the Revised Sexual Experiences Survey-Victimization

  The Journal of Sex Research · 2025-06-10 · 2 citations

  article

  = 474) using measurement beyond prototypical cisgender heterosexual scenarios. Prevalences of noncontact, technology-facilitated, illegal acts, and verbal pressure SE were stratified by SOGI. Logistic regression was used to assess associations between SOGI and SE. Findings suggest alarmingly high sample-wide prevalence, with 95.23% of participants reporting any experience of SE. Asexual and lesbian cisgender women had significantly lower odds of experiencing verbal pressure and illegal acts than bisexual cisgender women. High prevalence provides evidence for the urgent need to continue investigating LGBTQ+ SE, particularly illegal acts and technology-facilitated SE. Future research should oversample underrepresented SOGI subgroups to bolster cell sizes and increase reliability. Understanding LGBTQ+ SE is essential for informing targeted prevention and intervention.

  PublisherDOI

• Perceptions of bisexual identity, outness, and mental health among racially diverse bisexual women and men

  Self and Identity · 2025-06-24 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  This study, employing data from the Women's and Men's Daily Experiences Studies, examines relationships between outness, anticipated binegativity, internalized binegativity, bisexual meta-perceptions, and mental health among 235 racially diverse bisexual adults. Path analyses via MPLUS explored whether several measures of negative bisexual identity perceptions were associated with relationships between outness and mental health, while moderation analyses assessed if positive identity perceptions moderate this relationship. Outness showed no direct association with anxiety or depression. However, anticipated binegativity was related to increased anxiety and depression. The association between outness and the different measures of negative identity perceptions varied. Additionally, community connectedness was inversely related to depression. These findings emphasize the necessity for additional research addressing bisexual-specific stressors, fostering positive identity perceptions, and enhancing community support for improving the mental well-being of bisexual individuals, particularly those that are people of color.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “No Man’s Land”: A Qualitative Exploration of Perceptions of Structural Stigma Among Bisexual Men Compared with Gay Men

  LGBT Health · 2025-10-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Purpose: Recent research suggests that the benefits of minimized structural stigma experienced by gay men are not matched in bisexual men. The purpose of this study was to explore how bisexual men perceive structural stigma compared with gay men in hopes of understanding why improvements in structural stigma among sexual minority individuals may not equally benefit bisexual people. Methods: In 2020–2021, we conducted in-depth interviews with 19 bisexual men and 40 gay men recruited from a larger longitudinal cohort study of 502 men. Interviews were conducted by phone or Zoom (camera off). The interview guides for gay and bisexual men were nearly identical, except that bisexual men were asked specifically about structural stigma related to bisexuality. All interviews were recorded digitally, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using grounded theory as an analytic strategy. Results: Emergent findings show that three interrelated forces complicate the relationship between structural stigma and outcomes for bisexual men: assumed heterosexuality, invisibility and erasure of bisexuality, and the blurring of interpersonal and structural stigma. In particular, bisexual men had trouble identifying structural stigma, reflecting the difficulty of fully pinning down this type of stigma. Conclusion: To understand the disparate effects of structural stigma for bisexual and gay men, we encourage scholars to take these dynamics into account. We suggest new concrete ways to measure structural stigma against bisexual people and better incorporate perspectives from bisexual men into future structural stigma research and interventions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Correlates of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) use among college students in the United States

  Journal of HIV/AIDS & Social Services · 2024-11-11

  article
  PublisherDOI

• (Re)conceptualizing structural stigma: Insights from a qualitative study of sexual minority men in a longitudinal, population-based cohort.

  Stigma and Health · 2024-09-19 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  " Based on these themes, we offer a revised definition: Structural stigma is manifest when institutional policies, practices, and cultural norms produce societal conditions that create unfreedom, engender failures of recognition, or undermine social safety. Implications for structural stigma measurement, and for research with other stigmatized groups, are discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• Effects of social support interventions on LGBTQ+ survivor-victims of Intimate Partner Violence: a systematic review

  Sexual and Gender Diversity in Social Services · 2024-11-13 · 3 citations

  review
  PublisherDOI

• Variations in Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) Awareness and Healthcare Provider Interactions in a Nationally Representative Sample of American Men Aged 15–49 Years: A Cross-Sectional Study

  AIDS and Behavior · 2023-02-14 · 4 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• (Re)conceptualizing Structural Stigma

  2023-04-26

  preprint

  Over the past decade, the field laid the empirical groundwork providing evidence of the existence of structural stigma and its broad consequences. At the same time, less progress has been made with respect to conceptual development of structural stigma. In fact, in a review of the structural stigma literature, Hatzenbuehler (2016) called for the field to “further refine the current definition of structural stigma as new instantiations of this construct are revealed” (p. 747). Given the growth in the empirical literature on structural stigma, it is an opportune moment to revisit the conceptualization of this construct, for at least three reasons. First, as previously mentioned, one of the primary approaches to operationalizing structural stigma has been via laws and social policies that putatively promulgate and/or reinforce stigmatization of certain groups (e.g., Hatzenbuehler et al. 2009, Raifman et al. 2018). Yet, the field currently lacks conceptual guidelines for determining when structural stigma is present (or absent) in a law or policy (Hemeida et al. 2022). Further refinements of the structural stigma concept, particularly through the delineation of its core components, would aid in the development of such guidelines. Second, and relatedly, the identification of core components of structural stigma has the added potential of uncovering novel measures that are capabale of capturing features of structural stigma that are heretofore under- or mis-recognized. Third, while existing studies have begun to isolate potential psychosocial mechanisms through which structural stigma relates to health, this work has been entirely based on quantitative methods (e.g., Lattanner et al. 2021, Pachankis et al. 2021, Perales and Todd 2018). Missing from this literature is an intensive engagement with participants’ own subjective experiences of structural stigma, which may reveal new mechanisms underlying the negative health effects of structural stigma. Indeed, the identification of mechanisms for patterns observed in quantitative research is an acknowledged strength of qualitative methods (Gerson and Damaske 2020, Neier 2022). To that end, we use qualitative data from 60 in-depth interviews and 385 short survey answers from a sample of gay and bisexual men, obtained from a probability-based panel, who were participating in a longitudinal study of structural stigma and health. Through analysis of these data, we seek to illuminate different elements that need to be in place for structural stigma to be operative. To accomplish that goal, we model our approach on Link and Phelan’s (2001) influential conceptualization of stigma, which sought to define stigma in terms of a series of interrelated components.

  PublisherDOI

• Correction to: A Mixed Methods Study of Sexuality Education Experiences and Preferences Among Bisexual, Pansexual, and Queer (Bi +) Male Youth

  Sexuality Research and Social Policy · 2022-05-19 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R21HD059494

  NIH · $424k · 2012

• Structural Stigma and HIV Prevention Outcomes

  NIH · $3.0M · 2017–2024

• Health Effects of Identity-based Stressors Among Men

  NIH · $453k · 2017–2021

Frequent coauthors

• J. Dennis Fortenberry

  Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis

  121 shared

• Debby Herbenick

  Indiana University Bloomington

  118 shared

• Michael Reece

  Ohio University

  106 shared

• Vanessa Schick

  The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

  57 shared

• Stephanie A. Sanders

  45 shared

• Devon J. Hensel

  Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis

  45 shared

• Barbara Van Der Pol

  University of Alabama at Birmingham

  41 shared

• Theo Sandfort

  New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute

  32 shared

Education

• Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Psychiatry

  Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons

  2005

• Ph.D., Applied Health Science

  Indiana University Bloomington

  2002

• M.Sc., Educational Leadership & Policy Studies

  Indiana University Bloomington

  1999

• B.A., Psychology

  University of Michigan

  1995