Polling on Gays is Being UNDER Estimated and Reported
A team of researchers from Ohio State and Boston Universities have conducted a new study to determine whether conventional public opinion surveys under-report the proportion of gays and lesbians in the population? And whether they underestimate the share of Americans who hold anti-gay views?
According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the answer is yes, and it cuts both ways. Polls underestimate the number of LGBT people in the U.S., and they underestimate the amount of homophobia as well.
“We find substantial under-reporting of LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] identity and behaviors as well as underreporting of anti-gay sentiment …even under anonymous and very private conditions,” the researchers wrote in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The researchers used two different methods when asking participants questions related to gay issues. In the first, the respondents answered questions directly, as pollsters are traditionally asked. In the second, the respondents answered questions anonymously, so their responses could not be connected back to them personally.
The results showed that people will not honestly tell pollsters things that are too personal or that they think might put them in a negative light or outside the mainstream, also known as the social desirability bias. That includes revealing their sexual orientation or revealing their homophobic tendencies.
Researches found that when participants were directly asked about their orientation, 11%, of the respondents said that they were “not heterosexual.” But when given the chance to respond anonymously, that number jumped up to 19%.
15% of the respondents who were directly asked said they would be unhappy to have a gay manager at work. But when responding anonymously, that number jumped up to 25%.
Researchers did point out a potential bias in their poll:
The study by the Ohio State and Boston University researchers, while raising questions about traditional public opinion polls, does not attempt to draw its own conclusions about size of the LGBT population or public attitudes about it since the participants were not a random or representative sample of all adults 18 and older. (The researchers used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website to recruit participants.)
In fact, they said their study group was younger, more educated, more politically liberal and less likely to be Republican or to describe themselves as being at least “moderately religious” the country. They noted that some of the groups under-represented in their study are probably more likely to hold anti-gay views or be less willing to say that they are not heterosexual.
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