ESRA 2025 Preliminary Program

Monday 14 July    Tuesday 15 July    Wednesday 16 July    Thursday 17 July    Friday 18 July   

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Issues in Survey Methods and Analysis about LGBTI+ Communities 2
Session Organisers	Dr Angelo Moretti (Utrecht University) Dr Katharina Meitinger (Utrecht University) Mr Tom Dörr (Independent Equality, Diversity and Inclusion management )
Time	Tuesday 15 July, 15:30 - 17:00
Room	Ruppert 114

Data collection and analyses focusing on LGBTI+ communities, which are vital for providing reliable information to policymakers, suffer from important issues. In particular, data collection efforts often fall short in addressing the wide range of issues affecting LGBTI+ populations. This data lack impacts policy effectiveness, significantly affecting the lives and well-being of LGBTI+ people.

These populations are ‘hard-to-reach’ populations, making them difficult for survey researchers to access; thus, carefully designed sampling methods are necessary. Additionally, significant methodological challenges arise when analysing collected data, particularly concerning confidentiality and privacy, as well as representativeness issues. These concerns can lead to measurement errors, such as underreporting of discrimination and victimisation. Therefore, these issues must be considered when developing and applying statistical methods. Moreover, due to the unique nature of the subject, variable distributions may feature a large number of zeros, making standard statistical approaches, especially based on models, inadequate.

We invite substantive and methodological papers addressing survey methods and analysis issues related to LGBTI+ populations. Methodological papers may cover sampling designs, data integration involving new data forms, weighting approaches, and statistical modeling approaches for robust analysis.

Keywords: LGBTI+, inclusion, diversity, sampling, total survey error

Papers

Career sacrifice for an LGBTQ*-friendly work environment? a choice experiment to investigate the job preferences of LGBTQ* people

Dr Lisa de Vries (German Institute for Adult Education) - Presenting Author
Mrs Zaza Zindel (Bielefeld University)

Recent research in economics and sociology demonstrates the existence of significant occupational segregation by sexual orientation and gender identity and differences in a range of labor market outcomes, such as hiring chances, earnings, and leadership positions. In this paper, we examine one possible cause of these differences that is associated with the disadvantaged position of sexual and gender minorities in the labor market: LGBTQ* individuals’ choices aimed at avoiding possible discrimination. This paper examines LGBTQ* people’s relative importance of income, time, promotion prospects, an LGBTQ*-friendly work environment, and diversity management in the decision for or against a job. Based on a discrete choice experiment conducted in a large online sample recruited through social media in Germany (N = 4,507), an LGBTQ*-friendly work climate accounted, on average, for 33.8 percent of respondents’ decisions which is comparable with the relative importance of income. Overtime, a diversity management on company level and promotion prospects are less important in the job decision process of LGBTQ* people. While the results show only small differences by sexual orientation, they show group-specific preferences by gender identity. An LGBTQ*-friendly work climate is more important for cisgender women of the LGBTQ* community and gender minorities than for cisgender men of the LGBTQ* community. In contrast, income is less important for gender minorities and cisgender women of the LGBTQ* community than for cisgender men of the LGBTQ* community.

Revealing Public Attitudes toward Sexual Minorities in Turkey: Results from the Turkish COVID-19 Values Study (TCVS)

Dr Ceylan Engin (Bogazici University) - Presenting Author

In Turkey, nationally representative surveys that capture the LGBTI+ population are non-existent, and even research on societal attitudes toward sexual minorities remains extremely limited. In countries where nationally representative data on gender and sexual minorities is unavailable, examining public attitudes toward sexual minorities becomes essential. To address this gap, I investigate both the prevalence and the determinants of intolerant attitudes toward gays and lesbians in Turkish society. The analysis draws on novel data from the 2022 Turkish COVID-19 Values Study (TCVS), conducted with 1500 adults across 12 NUTS-1 regions.
The findings confirm the widespread intolerance toward gays and lesbians in Turkish society. 40% of the population believe that homosexuality is a threat to social values while an equal proportion say they would feel embarrassed if they had a gay or lesbian family member. Another 40% disagree that gays and lesbians should be able to live their lives freely as they wish, and an additional 20% remain neutral on this issue. Higher levels of religiosity, political conservatism, and trust in government are significantly associated with greater intolerance toward sexual minorities. Intolerance toward gays and lesbians is also more prevalent among men, less educated individuals, and married people compared to women, those who are higher educated, and single individuals.
These results have several important implications. Intolerant attitudes often mirror the violence, discrimination, and prejudice gender and sexual minorities encounter in various social, economic, political, and health-related settings. Moreover, high intolerance can negatively affect LGBTI+ population rates of disclosure in surveys, thereby hindering our ability to accurately estimate the size, characteristics, and experiences of the LGBTI+ population in future surveys. These findings highlight the urgent need for laws and policies that promote acceptance and safeguard the rights of the LGBTI+ community in Turkey.

A Non-probabilistic Sample Survey to Study the Regional Variability in Attitudes towards Homosexuality

Dr Angelo Moretti (Utrecht University) - Presenting Author
Dr Katharina Meitinger (Utrecht University)
Dr Camilla Salvatore (Utrecht University)

Previous research revealed a puzzling finding in the measurement of attitudes towards homosexuality: In countries with extensive discrimination towards homosexuals, respondents were not aware of discrimination. In contrast, respondents in more tolerant countries report more frequently discrimination. At the same time, the countries also showed regional variability in the perceived discrimination of homosexuals. Respondents across and within countries might interpret the questions differently and survey measures are potentially misleading. Web probing is a crucial tool to reveal variations in respondents’ associations and/or silent misinterpretations when answering survey items. So far, web probing studies compared respondents’ associations across countries but disregarded potential regional variabilities of results. The combination of web probing with small area estimation provides a novel approach to study within and across country variability of respondents’ associations. Small area estimation approaches are able to deal with producing reliable analyses of relevant indicators when the survey is not representative at a subnational level.
However, our study is based on a quota (non-probabilistic) sample; therefore, important points need to be addressed here. This presentation will present the study from a total survey error framework perspective. In particular, we will pay a particular attention to the data editing and weighting steps. We will compare different weighting approaches we adopted in a cross-country context. These are based on European probabilistic sample surveys and/or known population benchmarks available via Official Statistics archive.
This project received funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

Write-ins or Checkboxes? Comparing Question Formats for Gender and Sexual Identities

Ms Christina Pao (Princeton University) - Presenting Author

A longstanding challenge in the social measurement of identities is deciding “how many” and “which” categories should be included for study; this decision has downstream consequences for monitoring and intervening on inequality. Though these categories have historically been imposed and coded by survey administrators (e.g., interviewer-coded sex and race), many surveys have since turned to principles of self-identification. Nonetheless, due to prior methodological challenges, there have been few social identities that utilize the most flexible form of self-identification on a survey: open-ended text boxes. Open-ended measures provide flexibility for the respondents, which is particularly useful for understanding marginalized populations or populations currently in flux; however, open-ended measures are challenging to code and difficult to weigh for costs and benefits. In this study, I compare traditional closed-ended measures and fully open-ended measures for gender identity and sexual orientation, two identities currently undergoing large demographic change, with an original survey fielded in the U.S. and U.K. in 2022 (n = 2,623). I propose a novel tool, the Open-ended Text Utility Index (OTUI), that summarizes the tradeoffs of using an open-ended versus a closed-ended measure for a sociodemographic identity into a single numeric value. My OTUI calculations for my case studies indicate that gender identity measures might be easily translated into a fully open-ended format at a larger scale, but sexuality measures may not. This paper encourages researchers to challenge the categories taken for granted by prior social measurement and provides the OTUI as a tool to gauge the feasibility.