Challenges to Doing Research on LGBTQ Issues in Education and Important Research Needs

Sexual Orientation and School Discipline: New Evidence From a Population-Based Sample

“…The stigma surrounding LGBTQ lives and the presumed sensitivity of asking about sexual orientation and gender identity in surveys have caused funders and Institutional Review Boards to resist the inclusion of these measures in large-scale survey research programs (National Research Council, 2011). Opposition to LGBTQ data collection has been particularly fierce in terms of research on minors (Wimberly & Battle, 2015).…”

“…These longstanding limitations have meant that almost all education research on sexual minority youth has been based on smaller, nonprobability samples (Wimberly & Battle, 2015). Such research has been essential for documenting the issues facing sexual minorities in schools.…”

“…The changing social and legal status of America’s LGBTQ population has enabled sexual minority students to come out at younger ages (Dunlap, 2016) and become more visible in schools (Cianciotto & Cahill, 2012), creating a need for greater research on their educational experiences and outcomes. 1 Although a variety of factors have impeded LGBTQ education research, a particularly critical issue is the absence of large-scale, population-based data sources that include information on both sexual orientation and school-related outcomes (Snapp, Russell, Arredondo, & Skiba, 2016; Wimberly & Battle, 2015).…”

Outing the Politics of Knowledge Production: A Review of LGBTQ Issues in Education: Advancing a Research Agenda

“…The volume’s methodological armistice unravels, however, in the penultimate chapter on the challenges facing LGBTQ education research, co-authored by Wimberly and Juan Battle. In this chapter, the authors critique the extant literatures on LGBTQ issues in K–12 schools and higher education for being heavily qualitative, and they suggest that the “weak reliability and limited validity and generalizability” (Wimberly & Battle, 2015, p. 224) of this research (rather than institutional homophobia and transphobia) explain why it has been published primarily by lower-status journals and academic presses. From there, they attribute researcher bias to scholars in the field when they state, “Often, those researchers who are willing to study LGBTQ issues are insiders with a strong connection to the subjects, to such an extent that it compromises the research” (p. 227).…”

Forum

“…Each of the various ways in which data on cultural identity may be collected presents unique empirical and ethical challenges (Matsumoto & Jones, 2009). In the case of gender, there is no agreed-upon way for individuals to identify beyond the male/female dichotomy (Wimberly & Battle, 2015), a situation that is particularly challenging for transgender students. Jason Silveira and Sarah Goff surveyed teachers’ attitudes toward transgender students and school practices intended to support them.…”