What does an Intersectional Sampling Design Look Like?
Developing a sampling frame for LGBTQ+ women requires a new generation of social surveys that are equipped and adaptable to build relationships with a people in our everyday and ordinary communities who are hypermarginalized. Sampling frames are central to providing a basis for extrapolating information to a broader set of persons that one can know — or, know of — themselves, even whens said persons are seemingly “alike”. Yet, the social survey is an ever more contested tool to understand the vulnerable population, much less communities who have been structurally invisible within it.
Federal surveys do not ask LGBTQ+ identifiers, much less provide capacity to understand the matrices of experiences that are carried along with a person’s sexual orientation and gender identity. Even then, how communities negotiate sexual and gender identities expands through social intersections of marginality marked by race, ethnicity, and nation (ethnoraciality), socioeconomic status and social class, and aging and the life course.
In a partnership between Justice Work, The Race and Policing Project, and Emory University formed in the midst of the onslaught of the COVID pandemic, the National LGBTQ+ Women’s Community Survey sought to address a dearth in research on the impacts of discrimination and violence on lesbian, bi, pansexual, asexual, trans and non-binary women who partner with women. We crafted a radical Black feminist social survey to examine the unique ways LGBTQ+ women form kinship structures, families, social, spiritual and intimate lives, while securing their lives and livelihood.
To do so, we innovated the social survey as a tool for social change in an anti-racist, feminist-rooted, gender-expansive transformative society.
- We built a quota sampling design that centered the lives and identities of the most ethnoracially and economically disenfranchised within our community.
- We programmed a survey questionnaire that brought a Carrie Mae Weems “kitchen table” experience into the online survey platform.
- We are cultivating and distributing a series of data products through the Critical Racism Data Lab that engages primordially with the values and visions of The Combahee River Collective Statement.
The fruits of our labor are just beginning to bear — below are some that are coming to you in Summer 2023.
This Emory University research project, LGBTQ+ Womxn Survey (click here), is IRB-Approved for Continued Enrollment.
Anyone over the age of 18 who has ever identified as a woman is eligible to participate in the study. We are dedicated to improving the user-experience of the survey and enhancing its principled foundation in Black feminist thought.
Feel free to participate in the survey project and/or reach out to Alyasah Ali Sewell of Emory Sociology, Principal Investigator, #Study00002118.
