Posibilidad de Escape

members of the student body, because SRU does not request categorical identification on gender expression, sexual orientation, or transgender identification from students. Therefore, I sent the survey via e-mail to all enrolled students at SRU.

In Chapter 1 I referred to my experience as an intern at East Carolina University (ECU). In response to the results from a climate study we conducted, the administration at ECU created the LGBT Student Resource Office. The process of analyzing the survey data from the climate study included data cleaning and analysis. At ECU students, faculty, and staff who did not identify as L, G, B, T, or Q answered survey questions, thus creating confusion during analysis. My internship advisor at the time, Dr. Linda Mooney, addressed those responses by counting non-LGBTQ students’ answers as missing. For this study, I had two participants respond to the survey who identified as cisgender and heterosexual. Because I am interested in the perspectives of LGBTQ students on campus, I removed these cases from the analyses.

Table 3.1

Focus Group Participant Demographics

Focus

Group Name Identity

Pronoun

Preference Level Major From

1 Sara Bisexual Female She Undergraduate Psychology and Biology Southeast

1 Michelle Lesbian Female She Graduate Higher Education and Student

Affairs

Midwest

1 AJ Lesbian Female She Graduate Political Science Southeast

2 Paloma Bisexual Female She Graduate Public Administration and Business

Administration

Southeast

2 Rachel Transgender Lesbian

Female

She Undergraduate Computer Science Southeast

2 Justin Gay Male He Graduate Education Southeast

3 Alex Gender Queer Pansexual They Undergraduate * *

3 Denise Lesbian Female She Graduate History Southeast

3 Scott Gay Male He Undergraduate Earth Science Southeast

Note: * indicates that the participant did not wish to share her, his, or their information.

7

Originally, I had planned to e-mail all students at SRU through the university’s informational technology department. The department offers this service at a price ($350 per mass e-mail), and uses it to mass e-mail students about businesses around campus (for example, local apartments). This resource was not available to me in conducting research. The informational technology department stated that I would need permission from the registrar in order to send the e-mail. The registrar, after not returning my phone calls for a week, stated that the Provost’s Office would need to give their permission. The Vice Provost who replied to my request stated the following;

Dear Ms. Cain,

Your request to send a mass or bulk email to SRU students was forwarded to us by the Registrar’s Office. After considerable deliberation involving that office and the Office of Student Affairs and Academic Support, the Office of the Provost has declined your request to send a distinct, stand-alone mass or bulk email to our students at this time.

However, we can offer a useful suggestion that you may wish to pursue. You may send the invitation and survey link to all students via the weekly email

communiqué sent by Student Affairs and Academic Support. [My assistant], who coordinates the weekly email sent to all students each Sunday night, could assist you with this. This communiqué was designed was for such purposes, and students have indicated to Student Affairs and Academic Support leadership that this is their preferred method of receiving such University messages. If well written and formatted, this would be an effective means to reach all USC students. Thank you for your understanding, and best wishes for success with your study.

My link was sent out through the Vice Provost’s Office’s weekly digest on Sunday, September 6, and Sunday, September 20. The link was listed third in a list of six “news” links SRU published, and was titled “Survey for LGBT Students.” The link was sent to individuals who were signed up to receive weekly digests through the LGBTSRO, too, on Wednesday, September 9. The weekly digest concluded with the following paragraph;

Leia K. Cain is a graduate student at the University of South Carolina. She is

conducting a climate survey for LGBTQ students on campus as part of her

dissertation. If you are a LGBTQ-identified undergraduate student, and have the

time, please take a moment and check out this survey.

Unfortunately, I believe that the alternative route of recruitment SRU’s Vice Provost’s Office preferred may have caused my response rate to be much lower than it may have been had SRU granted me access to the entire student body via a direct email. I think that it is possible that many students did not read the e-mail, and those who did choose to read the email might not have scrolled to the end of the weekly digest. A single, individual email, sent out to all SRU students, might have vastly improved my response rate, which was 68 students. While I cannot prove that claim, I do wish to note that the recruitment e-mail sent out for East Carolina University’s survey (2011) was an individual call to participate (instead of being included in a weekly digest), and the climate study conducted at ECU attained much higher response rates (above 300).

A total of 68 individuals participated in the survey. Respondents were largely undergraduate (n=65, 93.6%). Most participants identified as gay (n=21, 31.8%), followed by bisexual individuals (n=19, 28.8%), lesbians (n=11, 16.7%), pansexuals (n=5, 7.6%), queer (n=2, 3%), and questioning (n=1, 1.5%). Two respondents identified

as heterosexual, and four identified as another orientation. Other orientations were written in, and included “asexual” (n=2), “pretty gay” (n=1), “demisexual” (n=1), and one respondent did not share her, hir, or his sexual orientation. The majority of

respondents identified as cisgender women (n=29, 48.3%), followed by cisgender men (n=21, 35%), gender queer (n=6, 10%), and one transgender man. Five participants identified themselves as “other,” with two identifying as “agender,” one as “demiagender girl,” and two did not share her, hir, or his identity label. Racially, most respondents identified as White (n=53), followed by Black (n=12), Asian or Pacific Islander (n=3) and Latino/a, Chicano/a, or Hispanic (n=3), American Indian or Alaskan Native (n=1), and other (n=1). The respondent who chose “other” did not share how she, sie/ze he identified. I detail survey participant demographics further in Chapter 5.

3.5 Analysis

3.5.1 Focus Group Coding. According to Saldaña (2009), “ a code in qualitative