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.

However, I did get a question from one of my research participants a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to talk about.

After our interview, she asked me what exactly would happen with all of this information — specifically, with her interview — you know, what I would do with it, what it meant to use it as ‘research,’ etc.

What I want to say is that everyone has different processes: they coalesce at times, but they also diverge at times, and those points are contingent on the values and orientation of the researcher. I will happily get into a much larger spiel about that at some point down the line, but what I think she wanted to know was more in line with specifics.

So. Specifically, as my participants know, we conduct the interview via Skype (or FaceTime in one instance), and I screen capture the whole thing. This means I have all the video and audio from our whole talk — including my face and my reactions. This is actually incredibly unusual!

From the giant file that is generated, I export a video file. I then import that file into a software called F5, which is an open source software out of Germany. It’s an incredible transcription software.

Once I’m done transcribing, I import the text and the movie into another software called TAMS Analyzer (beware the 1996-looking website!). There are prettier (and more expensive) software packages out there, but almost all of them are for PC computers, not Macs, so TAMS it is.

The software doesn’t really “do” anything to my data – it doesn’t interpret it or analyze it – but it lets me classify, annotate, and sort of create buckets of meaning to apply to the transcripts. I look for patterns of meaning in the interviews and the IGBP videos themselves, the software lets me track it all in a semi-organized fashion. During that process of analysis, I’m writing notes to myself and rethinking things and going back to the video and rewatching for things I’ve missed and etc. etc.

What I try to approach this with is a real philosophy of and ethic of care and compassion. I’ll talk more about that another time.

Anyway, that’s a real summary of what happens (in brief overview) with your interview when it’s over!

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!

This is just a quick update that I will be contacting interview participants over the next few weeks. If you volunteered to be contacted, you will hear from me in that time. If you do not hear from me, it is because the email address wasn’t filled in.

The response to this request has been overwhelming, and I truly wish I could interview everyone who offered, but I want to note that there are a limited number of interviews that I can do and so not everyone who offered to be interviewed will be asked to.

Happy new year to all!

I’m going to paraphrase what I said in the video because it’s a little bit long-winded. Basically, someone asked me if I was going to be making money from the study – which led me to think about the larger question of what researchers get out of doing research. It’s an excellent question because it has so many different angles.

So, to answer the specific question of whether I’m going to make money or not, the answer is “probably not, but…”

Even if you don’t get money directly, you usually get something. It could be getting your PhD, it could be tenure, it could be getting your name out there–these things don’t come with money per se, but they are benefits that we should acknowledge.

Transcript
The study population is what I’m going to talk about right now. If you are someone who tried to take the survey and it knocked you out for some reason, telling you to come here to find out more…when you’re doing research, you have to specify who your study population is; who are the people you’re conducting research on.

In this case, I’ve really focused on LGBTQ adults who made videos. That’s not to say that I’m not interested in people who didn’t make videos, it’s not to say I’m not interested in our straight allies, and it is certainly not to say that I’m not interested in LGBTQ youth because I have seen some really incredible work coming out of those youth. As someone who was in middle/high school quite a while ago we really didn’t have the kind of organization that youth do now, and I think they’re really incredible.

But for the purpose of this study in particular, it’s LGBTQ adults. There are reasons for this, but I don’t want to really go into that until the study is over. There are qualitative interviews going on and I don’t want to influence what people say in those. I don’t want people to get caught up in my own head.

I will be posting the findings on this site and my thoughts, but that won’t happen for quite a while. Summertime or later.

I hope this helps you understand study populations a little better – you have to tell the research oversight boards that this is the population I want to study so that you get meaningful results.