CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- Northwestern University will participate a unique study of transgender individuals in Cook County.
South Side LGBTQ center Brave Space Alliance has launched a first-of-its-kind, community-centered research project in collaboration with Northwestern University.
The project, called the Chicago Area Trans Survey (CATS), aims to be the largest single-population data set collected to date on transgender people as a group and will produce research useful to community members and community-based organizations.
The study will ask 30,000 trans individuals in Cook County about their experiences, needs, and lives, which will provide trans people with data to backup requests for services and aid.
"So much of our current knowledge about transgender communities in the U.S. comes from non-representative studies that are rarely led by trans scholars or community members,” said project collaborator Gregory Phillips II, assistant professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern, in a statement. “CATS represents a much-needed shift in the way research has been done — moving away from research on to research by and for trans individuals.”
The information collected by CATS will contain questions on sex and sexuality, how trans people define their families, where community members go for resources, and how trans people engage in politics, among many other areas of inquiry.
The information collected will be used to create a free guide for community-based organizations around the country. The guide will contain insights and instructions for trans-led organizations to conduct similar research in their own communities.
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