In December, we commenced an update to one of our Demographic questions in the Question Bank Library.
Our Question Bank is a library of predefined questions enabling users to easily include standardised questions in their surveys. This change includes a progressive roll-out to the default options for the Gender question. We have highlighted the key points below:
- The initial updates will be complete by the end of 2024 and the update will be finalised the end of January 2025.
- The new question will have five options, instead of the existing three. We added a ‘non-binary’ and ‘prefer not to say’ option.
- Users should be able to migrate to the new question without losing any of the data they previously collected.
Background
When we first launched Culture Counts in 2014 we had three standard questions (alongside our dimension questions). Those were ‘Age’, ‘Gender’ and ‘Postcode’. We added several more standard questions over the years.
With the launch of Question Bank in 2022, we unlocked the capacity to include a much broader set of questions. However, we were still technically limited from being able to update the those initial three ‘demographic’ questions due to the way they were initially developed.
We are now able to make changes and have commenced a progressive roll-out to update the Gender question, with completion expected end of January 2025.
What is changing?
Our updated Gender question will now offer five response options:
- Male
- Female
- Non-binary
- Prefer not to say
- In another way (allowing respondents to self-describe)
These options look to align with the ‘2020 Standard’ from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) for ‘Sex, Gender, Variations of Sex Characteristics and Sexual Orientation Variables’.
The 2020 Standard is remarkably comprehensive and seeks to provide a question set methodology suitably appropriate for government applications. We’ve sought to distill the concepts discussed within the Standard as part of our new Gender question. As the 2020 Standard represented a change from the 2016 Standard for the ABS, much of their discussion in describing the changes were useful for us in reviewing and updating our own question.
Particularly, two points are important in unpacking our motivation for including a Gender question as a default question within our surveys.
“Gender is a social and cultural concept. It is about social and cultural differences in identity, expression and experience as a man, woman or non-binary person. Non-binary is an umbrella term describing gender identities that are not exclusively male or female.”
“Responses to a gender question may reflect a combination of gender identity, expression and/or experience. In statistical collections, gender may be reported in terms of a person’s felt or lived gender, as well as how that person is perceived by others, depending on whether information on gender is based on self-reported data or done by proxy.”
It’s this that helps speak to our idea for standardising a gender question in our surveys. We want to encourage users to understand how the lived-experience of ‘gender’ influences the way the people experience and understand arts and culture. In this way, we want to provide a survey question that neatly captures the nuances of the concept, in a fluid and respectful way, while still allowing for data aggregation and insight.
In adapting to the 2020 Standard, the changes made to our previous Gender question options are:
- Inclusion of ‘Non-binary’ as a new response option
- Inclusion of ‘Prefer not to say’ at a direct way of opting out of the question, instead of skipping
- The option to provide a custom response when selecting ‘In another way’.
Why have we made these changes?
When we first set up our initial Gender question, we provided three options for respondents; ‘Male’, ‘Female’ and ‘In Another Way’. We had sourced these options in consultation with our pilot organisations in Australia and the UK, as well as by referring to guidance from LGBTQIA+ groups and Stonewall.
That guidance typically looked like this:
Notably however, even this advice did not match the format we eventually implemented into our platform. Rather than ‘prefer not to say’, we gave respondents the option to skip questions. When we added functionality for ‘required questions’ however, it then became possible for users to prevent respondents from skipping the question, which wasn’t desirable.
Additionally, where guidance suggested giving respondents the option to self describe, we did not have the capacity to support this functionality in our survey platform, as it required the addition of a second question and a question logic system. In 2018 we added the option for respondents to input custom labels for questions, along with survey logic, but could not add this functionality into our standard demographic question.
We typically encourage users to add custom questions where their data requirements don’t align with our standard set of questions. In doing so, we’ve been able to see our standard Gender question was not suitable for many of our users. The difficulty we had was that because of the way we built standard questions into our platform, it was increasingly complex to change decisions we made over 10 years ago that had been baked into our early designs of the platform.
With this update, that is thankfully no longer the case. However, given the complexity in its early integration, updating the existing gender question is not a quick, turn-key update, but rather one that we need to progressively roll out over the next few weeks. Doing so gives us the ability to monitor the change and prevent disrupting the evaluation activities of our users. Tying it into the end of the calendar year also gives us a clean break from the previous question and the associated data collected.
How will this impact data collection?
We’ve been methodical around testing this change for users. This update will not impact data previously collected via the Question Bank Gender question. Any data collected with the previous Gender question will cleanly aggregate with data collected with the updated options.
When a new survey is created, the updated Gender question should automatically be added. If a user edits or copies an existing survey, the previous Gender question will still be there. To update, simply delete the existing question and then re-add it through the Question Bank under ‘Demographics’.
For more information, visit the Support Hub. For any queries, contact the Client Team.
We hope this update will make the platform better for users and respondents alike.
Are you interested in using Culture Counts for your organisation? Contact us to organise a free demo.
