Do gays count? Can they be counted?

Editor’s note: Bob Witeck is CEO, and Wes Combs is president, of Witeck-Combs Communications, Inc., a Washington, D.C., communications firm.

Aiming a spotlight on the lives, relationships and household structures of gays and lesbians represents a significant challenge for all researchers, from social scientists and demographers to market researchers and political pollsters.

This reality begs the basic question: How do you identify, enumerate and query individuals who often choose not to be recognized, let alone counted and observed?

Starting in the late 1940s with the Kinsey Report’s 10 percent estimate serving as a controversial benchmark, many researchers have attempted to perform their own counts using a wide range of useful, albeit imperfect, tools - from the General Social Survey (GSS), intercepts at community events like gay pride festivals, gay magazine readership analysis, postcard surveys, the U.S. Census measure of same-sex households, as well as conventional telephone and online surveys.

As communications strategists, we began our work over a decade ago to help corporations, foundations, public policy leaders and health care providers identify the myriad characteristics, needs and aspirations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in America. Like many others, however, we were frustrated by the dearth of credible, projectable data to accurately characterize this hard-to-reach population.

In our judgment, early market researchers too often distorted or mythologized the LGBT population by over-emphasizing the highly visible gay white urban male. This segment of the community was the most “out” and therefore comprised a larger portion of the magazine subscription lists as well as the attendees at gay events. This skewed research using samples primarily from gay magazine readership surveys. It is not surprising that some investigators ballyhooed the affluence and mystique of the gay consumer. To be fair, they were on target after all, but only provided data about a slice of a segment within the LGBT population - and one that was more readily detectable and open in market behaviors.

Regrettably, these distortions resulted in public policy side effects by exaggerating wealth and privilege among gays, and suggested that economic and political discrimination towards gays and lesbian are non-existent at worst, or are overstated at best. Poor data of course influences poor analysis and policy decision-making.

Fortunately, through advanced survey techniques and through the examination by social scientists such as Dr. Edward O. Laumann at the University of Chicago, Dr. Lee Badgett at the Institute of Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, Dr. Gary Gates at the Urban Institute, Dr. Katherine Sender at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Marc Rogers at Hunter College and others, we are achieving a richer, more complex and more accurate picture of gays, lesbians and bisexuals through reexamined and newly emerging data.

As marketers, too, we benefit from this scientific perspective and foster our own investigations about gay and lesbian households by tracking attitudes in the workplace and in commerce to understand the similarities and contrasts with the non-gay population.

For the past four years, we have worked in partnership with Harris Interactive, Rochester , N.Y. Our experience has been transformative, and helped us pave the way to better understand not simply the lives of gays and lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people but also about the essential role of advanced research. The lessons learned and obstacles overcome may be valuable to any investigator wishing to understand more about this emerging population.

We share a few of these lessons and insights here.

Sexual orientation has many dimensions

Fifty years after Kinsey questioned college students and convicts, we now may credit Dr. Edward Laumann and his colleagues for their important work,  The Social Organization of Sexuality  (University of Chicago, 1994), which establishes the case for defining homosexuality along three distinct dimensions: identity (how individuals self-label their sexual orientation), as well as the expression of same-sex desire and same-sex behavior.

In a national sample, this research posed essential questions about same-sex behaviors, partners, appeal and attraction. The survey subjects were given face-to-face interviews conducted privately and in confidence - however, the questions about sexual behavior, desire and identity were submitted in writing and asked in a self-administered questionnaire only at the very end of the interview. The interviewer never saw the answers because the private questionnaire was placed in an envelope and sealed by the respondent before being handed back.

On same-sex behaviors, this study determined that slightly more than 4 percent of women sampled, and nearly 9 percent of men sampled, reported that since puberty, they had had sexual activity of some kind with same-gender partners.

The fluidity of sexual orientation

Another important dimension of sexual orientation is the fact that, unlike most racial characteristics or ethnic traits, of course, sexual orientation is not an attribute that can be tracked nor detected at birth. And for some, sexual orientation clearly is not fixed but is instead a mutable characteristic. Sexual maturity and awareness awakens at different times for different individuals.

Another challenge with tracking individuals based on their sexual orientation has to do with the fluidity of sexuality itself. Is being gay or lesbian being attracted to a member of the same sex? Or is it only people who actually have sex with members of their own sex? Does it include people who only sometimes have sex with members of their own sex?

Laumann’s research underscores that the proportion of individuals who express same-sex attraction or participate in same-sex behaviors - whether male or female - are in greater number than those willing to self-identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual.

Our online investigations, as well as the work of others, also show that self-description - i.e., identifying openly as gay, lesbian or bisexual - remains a very complex process influenced by innate and environmental aspects. For some, particularly males, the process of identifying as gay or “coming out” appears to occur at more youthful ages, while for others, the process may not unfold until mid-life, if at all.

These observations ought to be qualified to understand that our culture is shifting in a number of seismic ways. In the future, with increased visibility of LGBT individuals and characteristics, the perception of children and adults will change with time. There is some anecdotal evidence of this shift underway - with adolescent girls attending high school proms together, and identifying as bisexual or lesbian.

Socialization, family expectations and cultural norms, of course, play key roles in the comfort and acceptance that any person feels about their sexual orientation. Most recent sampling of gays and lesbians, therefore, tends to be skewed towards younger, emboldened individuals (for example, between the ages of 18 and 35, contrasted with fewer proportionately who are 50 years of age and older). Our samples also suggest a wide range of self-knowledge about bisexuality - with a broad range of behaviors and attractions among men and women who embrace this label.

Gender identity vis-à-vis sexual orientation

Arguably the least understood and hardest to find population within the so-called LGBT community is that of transgender individuals. Unlike sexual orientation, gender identity does not specifically focus on same or opposite sex attraction or behavior. This is very new territory for social and biological research, of course.

Instead, a transgender individual is one whose assigned gender at birth may differ from their own perception as a man, woman or intersexed person (someone with characteristics of both sexes). For good reasons, researchers must take caution in not confusing gender identity with sexual orientation.

How many? The Census helps show the way

Census 2000 may be best recalled by the national media as the gay census for its far-reaching effort to enumerate same-sex households. Although single gays and lesbians were left out of the count, demographers say the tally of 1.2 million same-sex “unmarried partners” is the result of the most extensive polling ever conducted of gays and lesbians in America.

Remarkably, more than 99 percent of all counties had at least one household headed by unmarried partners of the same sex, including places in the rural Midwest and Deep South . Gay or lesbian couple-led homes totaled close to 600,000 nationwide, and moreover roughly one in three lesbian couples and one in five gay male couples were raising children in 2000, the Census report found - contrasted with 39 percent of opposite-sex unmarried partners who have children. The comprehensive analysis of this demographic data by Urban Institute researcher Dr. Gary Gates (The Gay and Lesbian Atlas, Urban Institute 2004), promises to provide us with the deepest and most valuable portrait yet of same-sex households.

The myth of affluence

Stereotypes about gay affluence are hard to dispel, yet economist Dr. Lee Badgett has dedicated the past few years to a closer examination of existing income and population data on gays and lesbians. In her recent book, Money, Myths and Change (University of Chicago , 2001), she explores the true diversity of economic life within this population and the reality that lesbians and gay men earn no more than their heterosexual counterparts. Moreover, it appears in some cases that gay men earn less than comparable heterosexual men.

Badgett’s findings rebut poorly-conceived marketing studies conducted in the early 1990s that claimed gay people’s incomes exceed the national average - studies she and many of us find are tilted toward the well-educated and affluent.

The anonymity of the Net

Finding hard-to-reach populations has always strained researchers and posed costly obstacles to yielding meaningful, authentic samples. Given overriding issues of privacy and stigma, gays and lesbians have traditionally been among the most difficult if not most costly to track.

While some researchers have resorted to polling at gay pride events or by relying on other venues such as gay bars and publications, these samples are predictably flawed since they include only the most open and fearless members of the population. Conducting conventional random methods such as telephone surveys likewise have produced very small incidence of self-identified lesbians and gays - usually no more than 1-2 percent of any population. Written surveys may yield as many as 3 percent gays and lesbians in any random sample.

In the past several years, however, online techniques have emerged as a favored solution because of their convenience, cost-efficiency and privacy safeguards. Online surveys allow respondents to maintain complete anonymity so that many more gays and lesbians are comfortable in being asked to share their experiences, concerns and specific details of their lives, partners and households. Consistently, the incidence of LGBT people among online survey samples has ranged from 6 to 7 percent.

While there are inherent biases in all forms of research, the key is reducing online sample bias by:

— recruiting respondents from a very broad pool of offline and online sources, backgrounds and geography;

— safeguarding against individuals attempting multiple responses;

— achieving generous sample sizes sufficient to draw conclusions;

— conducting parallel testing online and offline to scientifically establish weighting techniques for all sampling; and

— disclosing survey methodologies and margins of error to conform to industry polling standards.

In our experience over the past few years, we have consistently found lesbians, gays and bisexuals have a strong affinity for the Internet and its anonymity - and make far greater use of the Internet as their primary way to connect with one another with discretion, purpose and safety.

Attitudes evolving

Times are changing very quickly, and America ’s attitudes towards gays and lesbians are evolving with the times. From powerful trends in popular culture and television, to political reforms and historic judicial decisions curbing anti-gay discrimination, it is increasingly clear that gays and lesbians will play far more visible roles in day-to-day life.

Whether on the outside looking in or the inside looking out of the gay community, the explosion in new, better and smarter research will pay untold benefits in the years to come.