Bella's Insights from Our University LGBTQ+ Social Media Study

Hey y’all! My name is Bella and I’m a psychology major with a double minor in women, gender, and sexuality studies and criminal justice. I’ve been a research assistant with Dr. Walker since August 2022, so this is my fourth semester working with her. She has been so fantastic, caring, and knowledgeable. [Dr. Walker here, please note that I did not ask her to say that!] During my time here, I have been working on various parts of the social media side of the University LGBTQ+ Friendliness study. 

What did I do as a Research Assistant with the BESTEST Lab?

The University LGBTQ+ Friendliness study is a three-part study that covers 100 state universities from all 50 states. The first study looked at university policies, bathrooms, housing, etc. in relation to the LGBTQ+ community and any protections they provided. The second study look at the political party power in control of each state (we looked at the Governors, House, and Senate) and related it to how accepting and protecting state laws were to the LGBTQ+ community. The third study look at the social media accounts from all 100 universities and collected posts related to the LGBTQ+ community. I helped with the second study, but most of my time in the lab has been dedicated to the third study. 

My first project was to help with the second study. I used Ballotpedia.org to find out if the Senate and House in each state had a Republican, Democrat, or independent majority. I used the National Governor Association website (nga.org/governors) to find out who the governor was in each state and what their political affiliation was. Then, we figured out if each state was Republican, mostly Republican, mostly Democratic, or Democratic. About half of the states (24) were completely Republican ran, and eight more were mostly Republican dominated! After I collected and coded this data, I was done with my portion of this study. 

After that, I went on to work with the third study. I was working with a partner to find all the LGBTQ+ posts on the official school Instagram accounts. We started working from opposite ends of the list and worked out way to the middle. Unfortunately, after we collected all the data and moved on to our first coding step, we found out that we didn’t collect all the posts. Some posts were skipped over, and others weren’t in the time frame we were originally looking at. Our first timeframe was about 10 months, but we decided to round it up to one year to capture all potential LGBTQ+ holidays that might be recognized via social media. We also realized we missed downloading the pictures from each post. Our initial data collection took 1-1.5 semesters, and my partner wanted to dedicate more time to her other project that was pushed to the back burner. She worked on that project, and I got some new partners to help me collect the data. One partner was helping me collect the posts from Instagram, while our other partner coded the data from the accounts we already double checked. 

After we got done with the data collection, one of my partners started coding the comments, while John and Ciara started coding the post captions and pictures. They all did a fantastic job coding and collecting. After the comment coder graduated, I took over the comments and helped John, Ciara, and Dr. Walker with some papers.

Here are some notable findings from my research!