GaMIT: Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transgenders, and Friends at MIT

Group Description --- Living Pink --- LBGT & Allies Retreat --- The Rainbow Lounge --- Trans Issues Group --- allies@mit

Living Pink

The Survey

The survey was sent out during April/May 2005. An e-mail describing the survey and the intent of living pink was sent out to IFC representatives, Panhel representatives, and LGC-exec. Dorm lists were also spammed. An image of the survey given is below.
a picture of the survey

Selections from the comments are in the long data section and the statistics of the first two questions are given in both the long and short data sections. The third question was thrown out due obvious confusion. The data provided by it was reflected in the first two questions.

This is the first edition of the Living Pink Guide done by survey - previous years have only included self-submissions from residential communities. The guide is published through GaMIT (Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transgendered Persons, & Friends @ MIT) through funding from FINBOARD. The editor was Nicole Ackerman who had extensive help from numerous members of GaMIT and the online survey was created and hosted by Mark Tobenkin.

How to Use the Guide

The short info page is made to give you 'at a glance' info, showing the residence, percent responding, percent knowing out LGBT persons in their living group, and the average scores on the personal and group acceptance question. The long info page lists this information, along with the size of residence, standard deviations for the questions, and comments.

The standard deviations give you an idea how much people in one residence agreed. If a score is very high with a very small ( <1 ) standard deviation, almost all members of that community thought that the place should score high on the question. If the standard deviation is very large ( >3 ) then there is a lot of disagreement (usually scores including both 1 and 10) that can be caused by residences having smaller communities within them. Comparing the standard deviations between the personal and group acceptance question is also helpful. If a group has relatively high scores but a larger standard deviation in the personal category, then there are some members that may be less accepting personally but still recognizes the community is accepting. If the averages were roughly equal with larger standard deviations in both categories, often times certain people had both low individual and group scores, while others had high individual and group scores.

The comments may be the most helpful part of the guide. I have not included most quotes, but have tried to select quotes that show diversity in smaller communities, reasons for strange scores, or are representative of many comments or the overall scores. In dorms where smaller communities play a large role (such as New House, East Campus, and Burton-Conner) I have followed the comment with which hall it comes from in parenthesis. In some cases the group score is significantly lower than the personal score, and I have included comments that explain a possible reason for this. Many quotes have been edited, though I have tried my best to preserve the original attitude and meaning. Some groups do not have any comments because no one from that community left a comment, or because none that were left were conducive to the guide. While the survey did state that comments may be used in the guide, I did not include some quotes that could have been of a sensitive nature and not meant to be included in the guide.

Issues

As with any study, there are many inherent flaws in this. One is the bias incurred with an opt-in survey. Those who responded were likely of a strong (usually positive) opinion or had a motivating factor (such as knowing someone LGBT). This can be countered by reading comments and looking at the percentage of a community responding. In the cases where less than 10% is responding, it is very possible that those responding do not represent the community as a whole. The bias is not severely damaging to the survey, as many people who do not care enough to fill out the survey may not care enough to harass someone for their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Another difficulty is interpretation of questions. Specifically, the "Do you know anyone who is out as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in your living group?" question seems to have large discrepancies. While it is likely that in larger dorms people may not interact with as many other people, it is surprising to see some of the low percentages in the smaller communities. This could be due to freshman not knowing older members and vice versa. One difficulty is determining whether someone is "out" or not. Possibly they may be out to a group of friends, but not everyone in their community. Respondents may have used criteria of the individual being 'out' in the community, in the school in general, or out to the family. Often times it is hard to know how 'out' a person is.
The question "How comfortable would you be living with someone who is lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender on a scale on 1 to 10?" does not necessarily test how much a person accepts someone who is LGBT, but instead of comfortable the respondent is with rooming with someone who is LGBT. We phrased this question in this manner since many people will not outright say they are unaccepting, and the acceptance of rooming with someone LGBT is one of the foremost issues in a residence community. Some people may have interpreted this question simply as how accepting they are of LGBT individuals and consequently given themselves a higher score than appropriate.

An anticipated issue that did not seem to be problematic is that of anonymity. There was no way to verify that respondents knew enough about the residence they were writing about and there was the possibility of intentional sabotage. The data collected seemed reasonable and all responses seemed to take the survey seriously. There were some comments about the survey that I would have liked to respond to and some comments I would have liked to make sure I could have included in the guide, but there was no way to contact the respondent.