Free Speech on Campus Survey, LGBT+ by religion

[CV75]

1 hour ago, The Nehor said:

There was an attempt to make it something like that but the story of Achilles has a few aspects that make it a problematic choice. Mostly the rape stuff.

Only if we get Gritty as our mascot.

Ah... well, he was a heel.

[Chum]

20 hours ago, Calm said:

Serious or not?  And if serious, tell me more because it seems contextless to me…I can’t connect the two and would like to know what you mean because you are typically an interesting poster.

I'm serious. The largest group would be furries.

It's not a big representation. They're fairly diverse folks.

[Chum]

20 hours ago, The Nehor said:

Furry isn’t a religion.

Well maybe not yet but there's tons of overlap.

[The Nehor]

1 hour ago, Chum said:

I'm serious. The largest group would be furries.

It's not a big representation. They're fairly diverse folks.

It is definitely not a sexuality though. Admittedly there is a lot of overlap with various sexualities but I have never heard someone respond to a question about their sexuality by identifying as a furry. It is also a mix. You have your pup play enthusiasts who don’t usually consider themselves to be furries but are sometimes lumped in with them, those into the mascot costume enthusiasts, and those for whom it isn’t sexual, and a bunch of other varieties.

And of course:

[Benjamin McGuire]

The top school - Michigan Tech - I know quite a bit about. My second child graduated from there less than a year ago. You can't exactly say that it is in the middle of nowhere, because, well, it would be hard to describe that part of Michigan as the 'middle' of anything. And while they have an active policy that works towards diversification, their student population is somewhat skewed (for example, it is 70 percent male - and that's a significant improvement in recent years). Michigan is a swing state (politically) and is fairly balanced in that way. The student population is broken into three groups - Michigan residents, non-residents (a large percentage of which are not US citizens), and locals (who get a large bump in the application process). It is a small campus (5,000 undergrads), isolated, and while it won't make any party school list, the level of binge drinkers among the student population is significantly higher than most other schools (a 10% higher level than the top party school in the nation). Winter tends to last around 6 months, and the campus is built vertically - so that students can get from the dorms to all of their classes with a minimal amount of time spent outdoors. The humanities department is non-existent. Electives can be a little different. I don't think I know of many other schools where log rolling is a credited class (that was one my kid took their last semester).

Why go through all of this detail? This is a very different context from say, University of Michigan, in ways that actually matter to these statistics. Many of the students who wouldn't have any difficulty talking about the controversial issues raised in the survey would have a much harder time asking someone on a date (there is a saying there for the women who attend school there - the odds are good, but the goods are odd). At any rate, there are a whole host of factors that create problems for reading too much into a survey like this.

But, to get to the issue raised by the way the data was analyzed, there are several things I think that should be pointed out -

I am not going to request the raw data, so I don't know what the actual figures are that came from BYU. There is competing data. A survey here of BYU students published in 2022 provides data from 42% of the student population. In that survey, 92% of the students at BYU identified as straight, 5% identified as bisexual, 2% as gay or lesbian, and 1% identified themselves as other. This is very different from the survey results being used in the second link: 77% straight, 3% as bisexual, 6% as gay or lesbian, and 13% as other.

There are lots of things we could speculate about that might explain the gap. But we can say that the second survey was interested in sexuality as a part of the main focus of the survey, while sexual orientation wasn't asked about as part of the primary focus of the first survey. And I think that this makes a difference. The scope of the BYU survey (13,451 respondents) is really large (and greater by at least an order of magnitude than the number of students polled by College Pulse in the linked surveys). This suggests to me that in a survey where we are discussing sexual violence, students are much more likely to be open about their own status than in a survey about freedom of speech. This suggests to me that the students effectively told the surveys linked that their orientation was none of their business (a possible understanding of 'other.') It's also possible that the BYU study had smaller numbers because of a greater distrust of the system on these questions - but that wouldn't likely account for such a large gap. So, I think that while we could use the BYU study as a conservative estimate, it is much more likely to be accurate than the study linked by the OP.

So while I think that the original study is useful (to the extent that we agree with its methods), and that it accurately reflects the perception of free speech as outlined in the research, it's accuracy in terms of identifying sexual orientation is highly suspect. And this is reflected in the way that this data is handled in the research. The three demographic categories that correlated to differences in the results were race, sex (gender), and political orientation. Sexual orientation was not used. And this means that all of Ryan Burge's efforts amount to a waste of time. (And I see that @rpn has already pointed this out using much less text).

[JustAnAustralian]

22 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

I am not going to request the raw data, so I don't know what the actual figures are that came from BYU.

I did request the raw data, so I'll see if they come through with it, and report back.