Queer Quantitative Methodologies in Educational Studies: Introduction to the Special Issue

Context for the special issue

In this special issue we seek to center “queer” and “queerness” within quantitative research to image what genuinely liberatory and truly queer methods might look like in quantitative individual research. This topic has become even more salient as queer and trans individuals continue to find themselves increasingly at the center of political and policy debates within the current U.S. sociopolitical landscape (Sawchuck, 2022). State policymakers, school districts, and school administrators continue to weaponize laws and policies against queer and trans people that oppress and seek to erase them from schools and communities (Peele, 2023). At a time when extremists inside and outside of education and policy spaces that threaten the health, well-being, and existence of queer and trans students, quantitative methodologies can be uniquely positioned to highlight queer and trans experiences, interrogate the impact of policies on LGBTQ + individuals, and question the impact of education systems on a population that is increasingly under attack.

Quantitative methodologies have a long and troubled history, including their investment in positivist notions of “truth,” their origins in the eugenics movement, their history of use in pathologizing LGBTQ people (Strunk, 2023), and the perpetuation of “gap gazing” to create deficit narratives around minoritized populations (Tabron & Thomas, 2023). However, recent critical scholars have sought to utilize critical approaches to quantitative inquiry (Tabron & Thomas, 2023). Researchers have, for decades, contemplated what critical quantitative methodologies might comprise (e.g. Zuberi, 2001; Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008), and scholars such as Stage (2007a) first used the phrase “critical quantitative” to describe such efforts. More recently, scholars have created systems and models for thinking about critical quantitative methodologies that challenge positivism and work for equity (Tabron & Thomas, 2023). For example, QuantCrit has become increasingly widely used, and is the combination of Critical Race Theory with quantitative methodologie (Garcia et al., 2018; Gillborn et al., 2018). Others have merged perspectives like LatCrit (Covarrubias & Lara, 2014), DisCrit (Cruz et al., 2021), feminist theory (Heilmann, 2021), and Indigenous perspectives (Walter & Suina, 2019) with quantitative methodologies.

However, less has been done to merge queer theory and queer and trans studies with quantitative approaches. In her foundational review of the state of the field, Renn (2010) called for additional attention to quantitative research on LGBTQ+ people in education. Since then, scholars have taken up that call, especially in higher education research, with researchers increasingly studying LGBTQ+ college students using quantitative methods and large datasets. Less common has been an integration of queer theory or other queer and trans studies perspectives (e.g., Duarte, 2021; Garvey, 2017; Jang, 2020; Rankin & Garvey, 2015). In other words, much of the quantitative research on LGBTQ+ people in education has proceeded with relatively traditional positivistic methodologies. In this special issue, authors attempt to take up questions about what queer and trans quantitative methodologies might involve. This is a distinct, though overlapping, inquiry aim to asking how quantitative methodologies might address LGBTQ+ populations. Quantitative studies of LGBTQ+ people may or may not take up queer and trans theoretical perspectives, but the goal of this special issue was to explore that integration.

Content of the special issue

This special issue opens with Kamden Strunk’s (2024) attempt to bring together principles of QuantCrit with ideas from queer theory. He works to imagine what a QuantQueer methodological approach might involve, and offers guiding ideas for such a methodology. In the second article in the issue, Amanda Davis Simpfenderfer et al. (2024) use critical queer and trans frameworks to unsettle the quantitative assumption of generalizability, presenting the problematic usage of generalizability within educational research. Utilizing these frameworks, they then present recommendations for robust quantitative research without requiring that results be generalizable. Bryan Duarte (2024), in the third article in this issue, provides resistance to various binaries present in quantitative methods that result in oppress “ontological and epistemological positionalities” through a pressure to conform. Drawing from queer and critical race theoretical, methodological, and empirical examples they put form a non-binary quantitative method for researchers who do not want to adhere to binaries when conducting research. In the fourth article in this issue, Jay Garvey (2024) offers rich insight into the campus climate industrial complex to illustrate the implications of “radical incrementalism” within higher education. Drawing on “queer pragmatism,” the author holds in tension their own queerness and the need for data collection to inform decisions within higher education, calling on institutional administrators examine these inherent tensions in relation to campus climate studies.

In the fifth article in this issue, Mario Suárez (2024) offers a systematic review of the ways gender has been measured in K-12 survey research. Focusing on large-scale surveys, he outlines the nature of current practices while also offering critiques and future directions for more humanizing, trans-affirming measurement of gender. The sixth article is by Olivia Copeland and Cindy Ann Kilgo (2024). In it, they offer a comprehensive review of attempts to measure cisheterosexism in educational research. Using an ecological framework, they evaluate existing measures while offering paths forward for more robust measurement of systems of oppression. Finally, in the seventh article in the issue, Rebecca Campbell-Montalvo et al. (2024) demonstrate how researchers might queer their methodology, surveys, and analysis through their study considering how gender non-conforming (TNBGNC+) and gender majoritized students differ in their access to resources important to STEM persistence across professional societies. The authors demonstrate how empirical studies around important questions related to persistence and success within education can leverage queer frameworks within different stages of the research process.

Taken together, the authors in this special issue offer thoughts about what it might mean to queer methodology. They take up questions from the conceptualization of research, to the operationalization and measurement of variables, to analytic processes, to the use of research products. While none of the authors in this volume propose to have the “right” way to do queer quantitative methodology in educational studies, they all offer generative ways to move forward with queering quantitative educational studies research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).