Jillian Hersman and Truman Gelnovatch
FIELD STUDY REFLECTION
We decided to tackle the idea of LGBTQ+ rights because it is a controversial subject that
some students get antsy about discussing, but it is a discussion worth having. Although there is a
SPECTRUM club here at Gulliver, not everyone is a part of it. Therefore, we wanted to get the
opinion of the remaining population at Gulliver and see how they respond to our little questions.
We thought that this field study research would be pretty easy considering our central question:
within the Gulliver student population, how does gender affect perspectives on LGBTQ+ rights?
If we had to hypothesize what the general results would be, it would have most definitely sided
with females due to the fact that males are typically most embarrassed to admit favoring the gay
community. So far, with our eleven interviews, we have been proven somewhat wrong. Although
males tend to hesitate more often than females with some questions, for the most part, the males
do not bash on or degrade the gay community (at least not as much as we expected them to).
Something that we did not expect to pick up on was the behavior of the students when we would
ask them these somewhat uncomfortable questions; some giggled, some hesitated, some preferred
not to answer. Through our research, it has become fairly apparent that freshmen boys are the
