Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in Germany (SOGI-GER) – Bundling Interdisciplinary Expertise

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Societal, scientific, and policy interest in the study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people (LGBT people) is enormous. In Germany, the recent legalization of same-sex marriage has brought the topic into public focus. To date, however, even basic questions like the size of the LGBT population and the number of so-called ‘rainbow families’ remain largely unanswered. The same applies to questions in the fields of economics, sociology, psychology, and demography that have been studied extensively with regard to the heterosexual cis majority. The answers to these questions are critical to understanding the living situations of LGBT people and their children in Germany and to tailoring policies to their specific needs. From a scientific perspective, it is imperative that the social sciences in Germany catch up internationally in LGBT-relevant research. Currently, most of the probability-based knowledge on LGBT people originates from countries like the United States (Williams Institute, 2016), Australia, and the Netherlands and is therefore likely to be of limited applicability to Germany. To address this lack of quality data on LGBT people in Germany, the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) has launched a new project to add 900 LGBT households to the panel, among which 200-300 are households with children. The LGBT households were selected by means of a random telephone screening of the German population. Its panel design makes the dataset highly unique in the international scientific landscape, where quality probability data on these populations are still scarce, particularly in combination with a panel design. The aim of this research network is to combine expertise from different fields of the social sciences in Germany and internationally, and to coordinate the analysis of the novel and unique data from the SOEP-LGBT project. For the first time, we will be able to answer pressing questions regarding the lives of LGBT people and rainbow families in Germany. To waste no time, we propose a network that will coordinate the analysis of these data as soon as they become available. The overarching long-term goal is to overcome the fragmentation of LGBT-related research in Germany by pooling expertise from multiple fields in one interdisciplinary research network. International experts will be brought in to contribute their knowledge generated in other countries to the German case. Not only do we want the members to collaborate for the duration of the funding period; we also want the SOGI-GER networks to lay the foundation for these (and other outside) experts to come together and collaborate long-term.