There have been many surprises along the way, and I’m excited to share them with you.

Hi everyone — I’m posting this update from Vancouver, where I’m going to be talking about my research with a bunch of academic folks for the first time. The results are preliminary, they don’t include the interviews that haven’t been done yet (this summer!!), and it’s all very anxious and exciting for me.

I want to thank my participants for getting back to me and providing feedback so quickly so that I could make this roundtable that I’m on happen, and I also want to note that I won’t be posting my findings until after all interviews are conducted. I just don’t want to lead future participants to consciously or unconsciously speak to the conversations I’ve already had with previous participants.

I finally sat down and did some scheduling and realized that further interviews aren’t going to be scheduled until this summer. I’ll email people this coming weekend so everyone knows where things are.

I recorded another video in which I talk a little about researcher authenticity and trust, a little animatedly.

So, really, what I talked about here is that one of the reasons that I made this site is to be authentic, honest, and open. What I operate on in all of this is that we all have personalities and perspectives that we bring to the table in research. To ignore that, or to pretend that you can somehow orient yourself in a way that you’re somehow “objective” is kind of disingenuous. Often, what happens is that people who are in the dominant majority (for instance, a straight person) are considered unbiased while people who are in minority groups (for instance, someone who identifies as LGBT). The example I brought up in the video was the judge for the Prop 8 case, a gay man, who was questioned in the media because “how could he rule in an unbiased way on a case that pertained to him”?

Obviously, a straight person isn’t unbiased, but because that judge was a member of a non-dominant group ruling on an issue that would affect him, his position became suspect.

What I’m saying in all of this is that the idea that there is some unbiased state of being is – from my perspective – an immensely flawed idea. What we can do to help people who read our work make decisions about our abilities to orient ourselves appropriately and present our analyses and thoughts clearly is to provide as much information about where we are coming from as possible. And for me, that includes the values of authenticity, openness, and trust within the interviews, with my research participants, and with whoever it is reading this site.

Hi everyone! Interviews are currently happening, but I haven’t gotten to email everyone yet. Thank you to everyone who has been a part of this, and I will keep the quick updates coming, even when I don’t have much to report.

Research is a long, slow process. I appreciate the number of you who volunteered to be a part of the interviews and you can consider this an update instead of me spamming your inboxes. There are interviews currently scheduled through the first week of March; and I’m currently reviewing the videos in the 18-34 group to make sure I’m getting the data I need and am in the process of reviewing the videos in the 35+ group to select interview participants from that group.

The large number of people who volunteered resulted in me needing to change a tactic of my study – in order to make sure I was interviewing people who represented the people who participated in the survey (and hopefully the project), I had to change from simple randomization to a more purposeful method. The danger in random sampling became a risk of only getting one kind of story or one kind of message and missing the breadth of messages and stories that were communicated. There are definitely patterns to the videos and patterns within age groups, and these are important to take into consideration when I select participants for the interviews.

I look forward to continuing the interviews and to writing about my findings after the interviews are completed and data is analyzed.

Thanks to my participants so far and to Dan Savage for putting a link to this study in Savage Love!