Date: Friday, 5/17/2024 2:00 PM

Alisú Schoua-Glusberg and Daniela Glusberg, Research Support Services Inc.

Dave Roe and Adam Kaderabek, ICF International

 Kerith Conron and Jody Herman, The Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law 

John Finamore, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics 

Jessica Holzberg, U.S. Census Bureau 

In 2016, the Federal Interagency Working Group on Improving Measurement of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in Federal Surveys issued recommendations for a research agenda to measure sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) in federal surveys. These included conducting additional research with Spanish‐speaking populations “to help identify culturally and linguistically competent SOGI terminology and questions.” A great deal of research has taken place since then, but Spanish testing has been more limited.  Translation of SOGI items remains a challenge. As noted on the Office of Management and Budget’s Recommendations on the Best Practices for the Collection of SOGI data on Federal Statistical Survey, “Additional research is needed on best practices for collecting SOGI data in languages other than English using translations that are linguistically and culturally appropriate.”

To address this, NCSES/NSF and the US Census Bureau are sponsoring a project to create Spanish SOGI measures that accurately capture sexual and gender minority (SGM) status among monolingual Spanish speakers from a wide range of Hispanic origins. The project aims to learn how to ask these questions in ways that will be best understood by SGM Spanish speakers, as well as by the general population of Spanish speakers living in the US.  

 In this presentation we will report on project progress to date. Our multiphase study has included a literature review, an expert panel discussion, and four focus groups with limited English proficient Spanish speakers. Two groups were conducted with SGM and two with non-SGM individuals in November 2023. They included discussions about conceptions of and understanding around gender identity and sexual orientation. Participants were also presented question and response option formulations designed with influence from the literature review and expert panel. We collected reactions to alternative ways of asking SOGI questions in federal surveys. We will discuss how focus group findings fed into the design of a cognitive testing instrument to be fielded in the summer.  Focus group emerging themes will be discussed and illustrated with anonymized participant quotes.