An Analysis of LGBT Resource Center Programming
With so many schools using LGBT Resource Centers as their primary source of support for their queer populations, it is crucial that these Centers are designed and run in a way that best supports their constituencies. Unfortunately, while there is a fair amount of published work on best practices for Resource Centers, there is a gap in research on what Resource Centers are doing in the real world to help their students.
To address this gap, the current study asks the following question:
What is the effect of school type on the types of programming advertised among college/university LGBT Resource Center Instagram pages?
Independent Variable
“School type” here refers to public versus private institutions. A regression analysis conducted by Fine (2012) found that the colleges that were most likely to have an LGBT Resource Center were large, selective, public institutions located in the northern and western regions of the country. They attributed the lower level of centers at private institutions to the high rate of religiously affiliated private schools, as schools with religious ties were much less likely to have a center than those without. So, the sample was limited to non-religious schools in order to look more closely at the activities of active centers and compare how centers operate at public schools, which are more likely to be larger and have more funding and staff for student support services, versus private schools, which may lack the material resources or critical mass of students to support an active center.
Dependent Variable
“Program Type” refers here to the structure and intended audience of the events and resources offered and advertised by the centers. Several researchers have noted that the traditions of the mainstream Gay Rights Movement, and the ‘safe space’ ideologies that many centers operate under, open them up to problems with intersectionality and the inclusion of all members of the LGBTQIA+ community. This includes bisexual students (Tavarez 2022), transgender and gender-nonconforming students (Garvey et al. 2019: Goldberg 2018: Marine and Nicolazzo 2014: Renn 2010), religious queer students (Zamani-Gallaher and Choudhuri 2016), and queer students of color (Duran 2019: Marine and Nicolazzo 2014: Rankin et al. 2019: Fox and Ore 2010: Nicolazzo 2017). Therefore, I was interested to see how the programming advertised by the centers in my sample addressed these issues of intersectionality and variable identity within the Queer community. I was also interested in the type of programming offered by the centers as my previous research (Eveland 2024) has found that students prefer Resource Center programming that fosters community building and socialization over more formal educational and training-based programming. Individual posts were evaluated for program type using a mix of basic and interpretive content analysis. This included quantitative counts of specific key works like “outreach” and “community building” as well as qualitative evaluations of factors like the tone and intention of the posts.
Units of Observation and Analysis
My units of observation were the programs offered by college/university LGBT Resource Centers. Within this, the units of analysis were be the words and images found in posts advertising programming on the public Instagram pages of a selection of college/university LGBT Resource Centers during the Fall 2023 semester. The specific pages and posts under analysis were gathered by randomly selecting four schools, two private and two public, from each of the five regions of the US from a list of schools with LGBT Resource Centers. From the Instagram pages of these centers, three posts made during the sampling period were randomly selected. This resulted in 60 total posts from 20 schools. While I looked at Instagram to source my units of analysis, this research does not critically engage with social media as a means of communication. Through my personal experience working at a resource center and looking at the pages of other centers, I found Instagram pages to be the most common method of publicly posting event advertisements. These pages are simply a convenient place to find a consistent public record of the events and programs that these centers offer and were not analyzed as a reflection of the center’s engagement with social networks.