LAUSR

The general omission of sexual identities in quantitative education research is highly problematic, though not entirely surprising. Few national higher education data sets include sexual identity in data collection, resulting in an astonishingly low proportion of quantitative studies examining students’ academic or social outcomes in relation to their sexual identities (Garvey, 2014). Quantitative studies are central to advancing policies and practices in higher education (Stage, 2007), and without empirical examinations about students’ sexual identities, researchers hinder institutional advocacy, policy reform, and resource allocation for large groups of individuals, namely lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) students (Rankin & Garvey, 2015). Including sexual identities in education survey research is critically important to uncover large-scale processes that perpetuate systemic social and institutional inequities and more appropriately describe LGBQ educational experiences (Stage, 2007). In recent years, education researchers have begun adding a sexual identity demographic question on national surveys. The 2015 Freshman Survey administered by the Higher Education Research Institute allowed students to identify their sexual orientation for the first time in the survey’s history (Eagan et al., 2016). Other researchers have also included sexual identity in their national survey designs, most notably the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership (Dugan & Yurman, 2011) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (though only if an institution specifically elects to include the question; Indiana University School of Education, n.d.). Unfortunately, there are few guidelines for how to adequately represent participants’ sexual identities in survey instrumentation and question construction, which is evident when examining the response categories included across the aforementioned survey instruments (Table 1). Indeed, all three survey instruments include response options for certain sexual identities: heterosexual/ straight, gay/lesbian, and bisexual; however, one sexual identity classification has varied inclusion: queer. The Williams Institute provides arguably the most widely used guide to the best scientific approaches for gathering data on sexual orientation (Badgett & Goldberg, 2009). Their best practices add to the confusion of whether to include queer as a sexual identity classification, because question constructions put forth by the Williams Institute’s multidisciplinary expert panel do not include queer as a categorical response option.