11 Jun Researching LGBTQ+ Populations: Thinking Beyond Labels
When I think about what draws me most to research, I think about how it illuminates human nature. UX research brings a sense of humanity back into products and concepts that may have only existed as incubating ideas within a product development team. It can be a grounding force that adds a human sensibility to the conversation around how to design an app or build an online space. It reminds us of what everyday, lived experiences look like for people like you and I, and the importance of considering them in the design process.
In the fast-paced world of tech and UX, researchers and designers often need to find clear patterns of human identity development and behavior, quickly. But as much of our team at Fluent can tell you, sometimes the most interesting findings and data can emerge from bizarre, unique, outlier instances. When we approach data with curiosity and don’t impose patterns or internalized bias on our findings, we can discover new findings that take our work to a deeper level and usher in innovation.
Discovering novelty in the unique always makes me think of queer theory. In my anthropological studies, like many other young social scientists, I was enamored with theorists like Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and Audre Lorde, who all offered up new ways of understanding identity. Queer theory and queer frameworks lend themselves to thinking about the world and identity-making in new ways, and remind us that we should push back on and think beyond reductive binaries. This is not to say that creating categories and labels is wholly bad. In fact, as UX researchers, it is often our job to create categories, personas, and labels out of raw data that our clients and partners can use to inform their work.
But as I reflect on queerness this June, I am once again thinking about having consideration for the outlier. Fluent often works with children and teens, and it is worthwhile to consider that Gen Z currently has the largest ratio of LGBTQ+ individuals in comparison to older generations, a trend that is expected to continue. What does this mean for our work as researchers?
It means that we need to pay extra close attention to the unique, the novel and the outliers. Beyond buzzwords and news clickbait, there is a significant shift occurring in how younger individuals consider their identity, especially when it comes to gender and sexuality. There have been discussions in research circles, for example, about Gen Z’s rejection of labels. We see this mirrored in Gen Z culture – public figures like Billie Eilish, Joshua Bassett, Ice Spice, and Phoebe Bridgers exist as queer individuals with little to no fanfare about waving a specific label or placing themselves in a certain category. This differs from older generations of LGBTQ+ individuals, who grew up in an entirely different cultural landscape of labeling, self-disclosure, and the intentions and consequences tied to both.
It seems to me that every Pride month, the etymology of what’s in a label always comes up in community discussions. As a researcher and a queer person, it always feels like an ironic intersection of my personal and professional life.
In research circles, making research more inclusive is a topic that is being explored more and more every day. While this can include concrete steps, like changing the options for identity identification on a survey, I think it also needs to include ideological exploration. In other words: as a qualitative researcher, classically, I think we need to try and understand the WHY just as much as we are observing the WHAT. And as we look to emerging populations like Gen Z and Gen Alpha, I encourage the research community to table bias and prior knowledge, and pay extra close attention to what may exist outside of the categories, ideologies, and binaries we may be imposing on our participants, and on our findings.
By Charlotte Beatty, User Experience Researcher
