Can There Be A Feminist Demography? Learning From Queer Participants in a Longitudinal Fertility Study

• In Event: Feminist Methods

Abstract

What can demographers learn from listening to the critical perspectives of non-heterosexual women participating in fertility research? We may not explicitly recruit sexual minority participants or ask questions about same-sex relationships, but information on these topics lies just beneath the surface. Motivated by the convergence of two prominent areas of inquiry—sustained attention to reproductive and sexual health as social problems on the one hand, and increasing articulated need for data on LGBT populations on the other—I leverage diverse data from the Relationship Dynamics and Social Life study (longitudinal surveys, participant comments/complaints records, and qualitative interviews) that together demonstrate the benefits of responsive mixed-methodological study design. I present five findings in the form of a story of “demography in action.” I then present lessons revealed in my analysis, and argue non-heterosexual women in fertility research offer demographers ways to increase validity of their outcomes of interest, improve study design to reduce attrition and increase survey data quality, and make sense of anomalous or contradictory findings.

Author

• Jamie Louise Budnick, Cornell University