Social Belonging and Cultural Citizenship for African American LGBTQ Youth in Birmingham Alabama: A Dialectical Approach to Methodology

Research participants marginalized by race, gender, and age require special protections under federal guidelines. This paper presents the methodological approaches utilized in the dissertation project “Creating Belonging: Cultural Citizenship for African American LGBTQ Youth in Birmingham Alabama”. The social and political implications of the intersections of race and gender embodied by these young individuals are embedded in historical processes of exclusion and subjugation in Birmingham and in the United States more broadly. To protect the privacy and safety of participants and to collect valid and reliable data, a carefully devised research plan was necessary. The process of data collection, consisting of participant observation, anonymous surveys, interviews, and two 12-week series of art classes culminating with public exhibits of participants’ spoken, written and mixed media works of art was decided on through a dialectal process between the relevant literatures, the Office of Research Integrity at the University of Kentucky, federal guidelines such as the Belmont Report, and the National Science Foundation. Through the resulting mixed-methods approach, this project hopes to advance social science understandings of cultural citizenship through its focus on everyday urban sociospatial practices as sites of civic engagement as it examines how African American LGBTQ youth in Birmingham Alabama employ everyday interactions and practices to create places of belonging. This paper discusses each research method and the rationale behind its use related to the goals and ethics of qualitative human-subjects research.