Keep an eye out for this study being used by the LGBTQI+ activists to justify including gender and sexual diversity education (i.e. gender propaganda and child grooming) into government school curriculums. The study, published in the Journal of Sex Education, was the subject of an article on the left-wing Conversation website. The study and the Conversation article make the highly improbable claim that, on average, 4 in 5 parents (82%) of parent respondents support gender and sexuality diversity inclusion as part of the relationships and sexual health curriculum from kindergarten through to year 12 I found this result so improbable that I looked at the details of the survey. I am no statistician, but looking at the study a number of problems are readily apparent.
Chief among the problems is that the sample of 2093 parents was self selected. By my calculations, 4698 candidates were recruited by paid advertisements via social media (Facebook and Instagram) using targeted diversity sampling. 3,119 of these candidates were eliminated because they had not completed more than 40% of the survey. Having only 1579 participants left ( and needing 2000 participants to make the survey seemly credible) the study authors then obtained a further 514 participants using an additional paid sample recruited through Qualtrics double-opt-in market research panels.
What this means is that the study’s participants were:(1) people who allege they are parents of school age children who send those children to government schools; (2) people who use Facebook and Instagram; (3) people who have a propensity to reply to Facebook and Instagram advertisements to complete surveys, and (4) and the minority of people bothered to complete a gender and sexual diversity survey. In this latter respect, the authors say “...prior to the commencement of gender and sexuality diversity-specific items, participants were provided with a list of relevant definitions to ensure common understandings of the key concepts covered in the survey” ( I would suggest that the majority (3119) of original candidates who didn’t complete the survey and so were excluded said: “Oh, crap! Another alphabet people survey” and dropped out.
Thus not withstanding the multiple other deficiencies of the survey, and regardless of all the torture the study puts the data through the study participants were hardly a representative sample of government school parents (if indeed the participants were parents).
Read the whole study to get the complete picture but my view is that the result was no surprise given the conceptual framework for the study. This reads in part:
This normative production is reinforced by a particular ‘culture of limitation’ that is present in Australian society (Ferfolja and Ullman 2020). This phenomenon is reflected in complex, historically evolving, often media supported, underlying racism, sexism, homophobia and cisgenderism that intersects with neoliberal, neoconservative and patriarchal discourses that subjugate, limit and marginalise individuals and communities who do not fit the dominant, normative personage: perpetuated as heterosexual, cisgender, white, middle class and male. All other subjectivities are positioned as abnormal, immoral, problematic, non-contributory, and even socially perilous. Hence, such subjects and their associated knowledges must be repressed and distanced from young people who are universally socially-constructed through Western discourses of childhood.