Studying “LGBT-Friendly” Organizations: Are They Actually Friendly?

by Johanna Schmidt

Increasingly, public facilities and organizations present themselves as LGBT-friendly. While a change like this should benefit everyone involved, a doctor and a psychologist are trying to find out why it doesn’t—at least, not quite yet.

Dr. Joel Kushner and fellow psychologist Lisa Blum are consultants on a project called All Families Welcome. The project is funded by First 5 LA, a unique child advocacy organization.

Kushner and Blum are in their third year of the five-year study that has set out to gauge the success rate of organizations that claim they are LGBT friendly.

The study began in late 2009, asking families questions about their experiences with service organizations (like doctors, schools, hospitals, and federal agencies) and how they felt they were treated. These experiences were then mapped on the Organizational Climate Continuum, which includes hostile, indifferent, tolerant, inclusive, embracive. Kushner and Blum gathered this information through personal interviews and surveys.

“The study asks families if they felt their family makeup was acknowledged or ignored,” Kushner says.

Families answered questions about the inclusivity of paperwork, images on handouts and documents, and staff treatment during an average visit to various service providers. The questions were designed to investigate how welcome or unwelcome each family felt.

“We wanted to find out if a family's hospital staff, for example, would actually use the term 'two mommies' to the children, or would they avoid it because it made them feel uncomfortable,” Kushner says.            

Kushner and Blum were surprised by the results. Though they had expected to hear much more negative feedback, the 220 respondents reported twice as many positive experiences as negative. Kushner and Blum sorted data about various service providers into either the "welcoming" or "unwelcoming" category.

Private practice doctors and schools topped the "welcoming" list, while hospitals and federal agency services topped the "unwelcoming" list.

Interestingly enough, private practices and schools—the top two sectors on the welcoming list—also came in third and fourth on the unwelcoming list. Kushner and Blum hypothesized that many experiences fall into a range of acceptance or non-acceptance (rather than being a strictly accepting or non-accepting experience), and developed the Organizational Climate Continuum in response.

The goal of this study is twofold, Kushner says; not only does it hold organizations accountable, but in the end “[we] want to be able to help parents speak up for their needs,”

By using the Continuum, Kushner and Blum think they can prompt conversations “about institutional biases in service provision, rather than individually-focused negative experiences and leads to identifying advocacy opportunities for LGBT parents.”

In the final two years of the study, the psychologists feel that through public awareness campaigns and training activities, families can feel even more empowered to speak up for their needs.

The information provided by All Families Welcome aims to "guide leaders to set congruent goals about the type of climate they wish to create in their organizations, ultimately fostering better and more inclusive service to LGBT-parented families."

You can visit the center online: LA Gay and Lesbian Center.