Wednesday 23rd November 2022, 13:40–13:55 (Australia/Melbourne), Zoom Breakout Room 1
Collecting high-quality data on queer minorities is vital to understand and address inequalities. Indeed, the benefits of queer-inclusive research are twofold; first, it provides nuanced data for researchers and policymakers; and second, it enhances the participant experience by ensuring their engagement with the study validates their lived experience. However, challenges remain to conducting queer-inclusive research and collecting high-quality data on queer minorities.
The very nature of longitudinal studies, which seek to maintain consistent and repeatable measures over time, presents an even greater challenge to appropriately capturing queerness. This paper describes how Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC), a biennial longitudinal study following 10,000 children aged 0-5 years since 2003, recently adapted content to be more inclusive of queer minorities. It further explores the challenges to queer representation that remain.
During the development of Wave 10, when participants will be aged between 19 and 24 years, the LSAC Survey Methodology team reviewed all content to ensure it was inclusive of diverse queer experiences. There were several lenses by which content was reviewed:
Updating gender and sexual orientation descriptors: To ensure gender and sexual orientation descriptors were current and adhered to best practice, multiple stakeholders (including queer youth advocacy groups) were consulted in the process of updating response options.
Modifying items that “other”: Items that assume heteronormativity and cisnormativity can leave queer participants feeling “othered”. To prevent this, items were reviewed and modified to remove heteronormative and cisnormative assumptions. For example, sexual activity items were modified to capture the full range of sexual experiences without establishing a hierarchy of activities. Pregnancy and parenting items were modified to be inclusive of same-sex couples and people who are trans or gender diverse.
Removing gendered language: Items were reviewed, and all unnecessarily gendered language was removed. For example, “his/her” was modified to “their”, and “maternity/paternity leave” was modified to “parental” leave.
While content changes such as these mark progress in queer inclusivity, challenges to queer representation remain. For example, quantitative research requires the use of categories and labels, limiting the scope of self-identification. Standardised measures are preferred for their validity and cross-sample comparability, and small sample sizes restrict the scope of analyses. Further, some measures score men and women differently, with no scoring options for people who are gender diverse.
Queer inclusivity is an important goal, and researchers should not be discouraged by the challenges and limitations. Taking steps to capture diverse queer experiences is vital, and reluctance to modify measures in a longitudinal study should not get in the way of progress. Longitudinal studies that evolve alongside participants are more likely to maintain high response rates from diverse participants and capture more meaningful data. This produces better quality data which is essential for describing and explaining inequalities.
Anna Scovelle is a Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Family Studies where she manages content design and survey methodology for Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. Anna has a background in public health, social epidemiology, and psychology research.
While working at AIFS, Anna is also completing her PhD in Social Epidemiology at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne. Her PhD is funded by an NHMRC Postgraduate Scholarship and examines how gender equality and the division of labour in the family setting impacts sleep and health outcomes.