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’s Department of Sociology, the National LGBTQ+ Women’s Community Survey was fielded 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. This survey is part of a larger research initiative, LGBTQ+ Womxn Survey, that is IRB-Approved for Continued Enrollment (Emory #Study00002118). Anyone over the age of 18 who has ever identified as a woman is eligible to participate in the study.
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. We are innovating the social survey as a tool for social change in an anti-racist, feminist-rooted, gender-expansive transformative society. We are dedicated to improving the user-experience of the survey and enhancing its principled foundation in Black feminist thought.
- 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 with the values and visions of The Combahee River Collective Statement to focus more acutely on the experiences of Black and Latinx women communities, and their allies.
- We are establishing a data portal for registered community partners and stakeholders to examine the responses of survey participants with completed data as of September 30, 2022 (“National LGBTQ+ Women’s Community Survey, 2021-2022“) as a whole and by social groups identified across eight demographic lenses — these are, sexuality, gender, education, family class, personal income, age, race, and region.
- We are hosting data workshops on how to use the data portal and make comparisons within the community of survey participants.
- We are archiving the data with the Resource Center for Minority Data at Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR).
- We are releasing unique digital media to tell our stories and more comprehensively. The first of which is our data on where respondents in the first release of data live. Check out our Contextual File.
The fruits of our labor are just beginning to bear. Feel free to take the survey, and share it with anyone over the age of 18 who has ever identified as a woman. Please send any questions and/or concerns to Principal Investigator Dr. Alyasah Ali Sewell at alyasah dot ali dot sewell at emory dot edu.