Is it a bit shit to be gay in the USA?

This is a blog post I should’ve written last week and posted on Monday. Oh well. I’m now wrapping up my small research project on LGBT+ housing and homelessness. I should’ve written this post last week as we launched the two reports on Monday – one for housing providers and one for homelessness service providers.

Our recommendations in both are pretty straight-forward, and should not come as a surprise to readers of my blog post – service providers should routinely ask service users their sexual and gender identity and get over their own cringe. In doing so, we would start to get decent data, but also begin a conversation with service users that is: “we are interested if you are LGBT+ because we realise it might matter to you”. One of the recommendations focusing on homelessness services might seem a bit odd though: we explicitly state that we don’t think LGBT+ specific provision, such as hostels or other supported accommodation, is required in the context of the lives of people who participated in our research in Central Scotland.

A lot of the lobbying for LGBT+ specific provision comes from two concerns. One is that LGBT+ homelessness is an enormous problem; we just have not found evidence for this. In fact, we recreated the methodology of The Albert Kennedy Trust, and surveyed homelessness services in Scotland. We got a very low response rate, and some really ropey data. If I were to make an estimate based on that, I’d say around five per cent of homeless people identify as LGBT+, compared to three per cent of whole population identifying as LGBT+.

Second is a presumption that the cause of homelessness in the case of LGBT+ is family rejection – that is, people come out as LGBT+ and then their families ask them to leave. We really did not find evidence of simple causation like this in our data. For example, two of our gender-queer participants had periods of homelessness because their families were not accepting of their gender identities, but their families were also emotionally abusive and this was just the latest example of this, so they had to leave the family home. In such complex cases, we cannot say for sure, but we could surmise that they would have ended up homeless because of leaving their abusive family whatever their gender identity. Similarly, another bisexual participant became homeless after their relationship with an abusive partner broke down and they started relationships with people of a different sex. Again, the causes of the homelessness are very complex here – we cannot say that the person was homeless because they were bisexual.

Because of these two reasons, we don’t think LGBT+ specific provision is suitable in a Scottish context. What is needed is better training among service providers to make the excellent current service provision more inclusive. 

Now, to get to the subject of this blog post – I also think that the drive for LGBT+ services comes from the USA (and to a lesser extent Canada) and, from what I’ve read among LGB studies, it looks like being LGBT+ in America is really bad. It really struck me when I was reading this paper that compares UK data to a wider literature review. That paper analyses data from the UK longitudinal panel study Understanding Society. It demonstrates that in some categories there is a small negative impact on your life from being LGBT+ in the UK. But the comparison data Uhrig pulls together from the US in particular, is far worse. To give one example that really shocked me: data from the US in 2013 showed that women with same-sex sexual attraction did far worse in terms of educational outcomes. In the UK, lesbians were three-times more likely to be educated than their heterosexual counterparts.

What’s going on then? Why do things seem to be worse in the US? I suspect there’s a lot of methodological things going on here. Firstly, data on sexual and gender identity is pretty poor everywhere, but it seems to be quite staggeringly bad in the US. The main source of data used by many researchers is the US Census, which has allowed same-sex couples to “out” themselves on their forms for a while and say they are a household. There’s three main problems with this: it misses single people, and we know LGBT+ people are more likely to be single; it doesn’t really allow for bisexual people to be recorded anywhere, and certainly ignores transgender people (but then, so do most surveys); and finally, it’s a self-selecting sample, from what I can gather, you don’t have to fill it in if you don’t want to. Whenever you create “prefer not to answer” categories in questions like this, you end up with that being your second biggest category after straight.

It seems there are very few population-level surveys which include LGB, or transgender, questions in the US. This means a lot of the US research that I’ve come across, for example focusing on homelessness, comes from a problem perspective and samples populations with problems, which as people like Prof Mark McCormack point out, leads you to find particularly troubling findings. To give one example, in my hunt for the source of that bloody 25 per cent stat (that a quarter of young homeless people identify as LGBT+), I discovered the root of one of the more bizarre versions – that a whopping 40 per cent of young homeless people identify as LGBT+ – comes from this report. You just have to read the subtitle to work out how they got that stat: funnily enough a lot of people who identify as LGBT+ use LGBT+ services. To be fair on the authors of that report, it seems that the stat has got mangled in translation.

The other methodological issue is the complex intersection of sexual identity and socio-economic status. I’ve only seen glimmers of this in what I’ve read, but I suspect middle class people in the UK feel more comfortable in their sexuality, which might explain why things don’t look too bad in our data.

However, I do wonder if there is something qualitatively different about the experience of LGBT+ in the USA, that it is a more socially conservative society. It certainly seems that social attitudes are marginally more conservative, with a small majority of people in the USA in 2014 still believing same-sex relationships were not “not wrong at all”. This compares to the UK, where in the most recent British Social Attitudes Survey, the vast majority of people think same-sex relationships are “not wrong at all”. More recent data from the US suggests that they are equally supportive of same-sex marriage as people in the UK are of same-sex relationships, however I would caution the conclusion that the US has become very socially liberal, not just because of the current POTUS, but because I think there’s some qualitatively different in the socially-sanctioned institution of marriage, and same-sex relationships more broadly.

As an aside, as I’ve commented before, I think these questions no longer collect accurate data due to social desirability bias, and we need to start asking some more, possibly more explicit questions, to get to the heart of peoples attitudes.

Finally, I think another issue is the lack of a decent welfare state in the US. For example, in terms of homelessness, one UK scholar commented that “[t]he sheer cruelty and vindictiveness of the US system, indeed, is sometimes difficult for Europeans to fathom”. To give one example, if you were a single, young, gay man in Scotland and your family kicked you because of your sexual identity, you would be unintentionally homeless, and your housing authority would have a duty to provide you with housing. I’m sure it’s not as simple as this, and housing authorities would try and wriggle out of it – one shocking example I read was of a housing authority in southern England who said a young man had made himself intentionally homeless because he chose to come out. But despite these cases, and despite the increases in homelessness and rough-sleeping in the UK over the past seven years, homelessness support is much better in the UK than it is in the US. And this cuts across a wider range of social and public services. If your welfare state is stronger, then if you come across a bump in your life, say due to exclusion related to your sexual or gender identity, then it is going to be easier to get your life back up-and-running again. So, I wonder if this is why outcomes do not seem to be as bad for LGBT+ people in the UK compared to the US, and it’s also why we don’t think LGBT+ specific provision is suitable in the UK. We have good mainstream services, we just have to make sure they are inclusive and supportive. 

Predictive social science

If you do an introductory sociology course* you'll at some point bump into the argument about social sciences not being sciences because they can't predict things will happen. This also comes up quite a lot in the evaluation literature, which I occasionally dive into like Tom Daley, as evaluations tend to be bloody useless at predicting what will happen if a policy intervention is rolled-out to a wider population c.f. the endless bloody debates about double-blind randomised controlled trials.

However, I just saw this tweet;

Fewer plans in poor areas: neighbourhood plans by deprivation decile. Reposting this after being at #PPPconf2015 pic.twitter.com/ODWzDx4cX0

— Alasdair Rae (@undertheraedar) September 10, 2015

And could proudly say, "we predicted that" - in this paper, I blogged about here. The paper came about from an ESRC seminar series and just some thoughts I had about our previous work on middle-class activism and how this would interact with the new neighbourhood planning system in England.

I don't have anything profound to say about the philosophy of social science and my ability to predict the future. But it does seem to me that social science can predict some things, the question is what things, and what are you predicting. We could never say exactly how many more neighbourhood plans there would be in affluent areas compared to deprived areas, but smashing together some theory, some findings from an evidence review and some statistical analysis of the British Social Attitudes Survey, we could roughly say "you'll probably get more neighbourhood plans in these sorts of places because of these reasons..." 

I should also add, I think this does say a lot for the realist school of evaluation from Ray Pawson's work on realist synthesis. It forces you to come up with predictive, useful, rules of thumb for whats works, in what contexts and why. This means we could easily apply the findings of our earlier study to the case of neighbourhood planning. 

In the meantime, PayPal me £20 and I'll predict your lottery numbers for you.

*I wistfully recall my A Level Sociology course and one of my friends proudly stating "a dog could walk off the street and get an A in A Level Sociology" to which another friend replied with "I got a B".

What I see in pretty pictures

I "pimped" my blog recently to make it look slightly less like I'd set up it one hour, one afternoon in January. I've added a sidebar which includes some of the blogs I follow, just over there>>

One I really like, and one of the reason's I started this is Under The Raedar the hilariously titled blog of the very nice, very intelligent Alasdair Rae, down at Sheffield. Not long after I started, his blog got picked up by the Guardian data for some mapping he did of the English Index of Multiple Deprivation. This impressed me, so I thought I'd have my own go. Alasdair does amazing things with data and images I could only image doing. His recent post about relative Chinese, US, and European population densities will definitely make an appearance in one of my lectures.

I can't say I'm as good with data, but I did find the recent Scottish Government housing and regeneration statistics interesting, especially demolitions since 1991. Here's two graphs what I did copy and pasted out from Excel (clickify to embiggen):

The first includes Glasgow (largest authority, largest landlord, largest number of demolitions) and the other top 10 demolishers. The next one takes Glasgow out to show some more of the noise at the bottom. If you read the notes with the data, you'll see this is mainly demolitions of local authority housing or social housing as it's very difficult to record demolitions of private dwellings, even though you're supposed to apply for planning permission.

Doing these, and linking this with Alasdair's work, I was wondering how you'd "read" this data. You might be shocked that so many homes have been demolished over the past 20 years in Scotland. For me, it's a story of regeneration strategies. If you look, Glasgow, Dundee and Edinburgh, peak in demolitions in the early and then late 1990s. These local authorities were the site of the four New Life for Urban Scotland partnerships between 1989-1999, which prioritised housing renewal. So this represents this activity. Across the board there's a pick-up in most local authorities from the mid-1990s as the Conservative Scottish Office started Programme for Partnership, with Priority Partnership Areas (a bit like the New Life Partnerships). Just after devolution, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, activity picks up again as capital spending is prioritised to social housing by the new Scottish Executive and its Social Inclusion Partnerships. Finally, after 2003 Glasgow's demolition rate shoots back up every now and then as the Glasgow Housing Association starts its housing renewal work. I also see quite how big some multi-storey blocks of flats are, as I imagine some of those massive peaks in the major cities are just two or three blocks coming down.

What do you see?

History and social science

So, I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between history and social science, particularly in terms of methodology as applied epistemology and ontology. This was occasioned by reading Christopher Pollitt's wonderful book Time, Policy, Management.

It's also been occasioned by me reading about Habermas' distinction between the Lifeworld of everyday experience and language and the System of zweckrationalitat. And I've recently started reading Dorothy Smith's 2001 article 'Texts and the ontology of organizations and institutions'.

Now I have to see if I can put these thoughts in order...

One thing that really angers me in social science is badly written social science. By badly written, I mean the sort of clever post-structuralist stuff that is actually hard work to read. I was reminded of this recently when I said to a colleague that I was very impressed they'd actually managed to read Chouliaraki and Fairclough. Their reply was: "parts of it I read and parts of it I understood... or at least think I understood".

I always find this quite ironic, since a lot of this writing is supposed to be empowering and a critique of language and society. Yet it's unreadable. It links to an idea I'll return to below - literacies. As an academic and a social science I have a different literacy to most people. I read academic texts very regularly and can write in this way as well. My academic literacy has changed recently well - being a busy lecturer I now have to be a lot better at skimming and I'm getting there. But the literacy expected of people like Fairclough and Howarth is a literacy I don't have. And I don't think I wish to have.

As far as I've got in Dorothy Smith's article she's made two points I find interesting that link to this. Firstly, that institutions are recreated by text and secondly that social science uses language to abstract institutions to understand them.

On the second point I have to agree. This is what Habermas was getting at with his notion of The System - reifying things to comprehend them when they actually exist in the Lifeworld. On the first point, this is something I keep coming back to as a historian turned social scientist. Whenever social scientists emphasise the importance of language/discourse/text in creating society I just think "no shit, Sherlock". As a historian the past doesn't exist. It only exists as a few shreds of predominantly written evidence you gather together to tell a story of the past. You critically analyse the text - who wrote it and why? And it's implicit that society and culture is discourse. And this isn't a problem. The standard of evidence is that which Habermas suggests is that which exists in the Lifeworld - the power of the persuasive argument and therefore there are very few certainties in history and as Habermas suggests of communicative action in the Lifeworld: 'the typical states are in the gray areas in between'.

And now I'll return to the first point. In developing something as simple as narrative history doesn't reify to the same extent as social science. It specifically tries not too abstract too much from the texts. You're expected to reference your evidence so other historians can see where you have developed it from. History, I think, as an intellectual project is just about focusing on the contrast from the now. I was reminded of this watching the wonderfully game Lucy Worsley on If Walls Could Talk as she explained that until the advent of modern plumbing in the late nineteenth century the very idea of a "bathroom" was entirely alien. This "problematised" the bathroom and hygiene as an idea immediately. It showed it was partial, social constructed and therefore of interest. When I learnt about the history of literacy in early-modern England this did the same for me. The vast majority of people before the eighteenth century were illiterate. Yet because the written word was things like penny ballads, literacy was actually just different. A penny ballad would be bought by a village and the one literate person would sing it to other villagers. If it was especially good it would be kept and become folklore. The reformation and its emphasis on reading the bible to reflect on one's own spirituality made reading the private act it is today. Therefore we shouldn't talk about literacy, but literacies. When it comes to Chouliaraki and Fairclough I'm as illiterate as a seventeenth century farmer.

Social science, being obsessed with the now can only ever achieve this through reifying objects. If it's positivism it abstracts them into theory and statistics. If it's ANT you turn them into "things". If you're into critical discourse analysis then you use a load of post-modern wank badly translated from Foucault and Lauclau to leave your reader baffled.

This has purposefully been a bit of a rant and I know there's lot of holes in my argument and also I'm generalising about history. But it is a rant because I think there's political implications for social science here. As a planner and social scientist I want to make the world better. If what I write is unintelligible to people then how can I do this? This was something I criticised in my research - the reification of social "things" in strategic policy divorced them from the Lifeworld of community activists, therefore there could not be radical democratic engagement. If I'm doing the same, am I not as guilty as the policy-makers I criticise.

The public popularity of good history highlights this. Pretty decent history books from good historians are often in the best-seller lists. Christ, there's even a few TV channels devoted to the subject. Is there a "social-science TV"? No, there's 24 hour news mis-reporting the "now". I think social science can learn a lot from history to reflect on methodology to make it more readable and change the literacy of social science.

Does this make sense?