our research design | Project Village

research design

Our research asks what does good family support look like for transgender young people in Aotearoa?

We know that family support is protective for transgender youth, but we know less about what this support looks like in practice. Our project expands the focus of research to date from parents to transgender young people themselves and their broader family, from ethnic majority participants to ethnic minority communities, and from trauma to resistance. We use discourse analysis, showing how transgender young people and their families challenge oppressive social structures through their use of language and visual images.

Our project centres the perspectives of transgender young people, whose views on family support have been neglected in previous research. We will interview transgender young people and a selection of family members they identify as having best supported them. We will use the method of reflective drawing, asking participants to draw and discuss their experiences in interview. In phase one, the research team will interview twelve transgender young people (3 Māori, 3 Pacific, 3 Asian and 3 Pākehā) who identify as having experienced support from at least some of their family. These young people will be asked to draw their experience of family support and to list their family support network and describe how these people have supported them. In phase two, with the young people’s permission, the research team will interview up to five of these family members per participant (60 in total). These participants will be asked to draw and discuss their experience of supporting the young person.

The research will result in a diverse collection of representations of family support, from the perspective of the transgender young people at the centre of this experience and their most valued supporters. We will communicate our results to transgender communities and family members via a range of community outreach activities. This will include a printed/digital resource for families, based on the drawings and interviews. We will create translations of the resource in te reo Māori and prominent Asian and Pacific languages. We will also share our results in the media in the form of opinion pieces, radio interviews, and news articles. Further community outreach will occur in forms negotiated with the organisations on the project advisory group, depending on what will best meet community needs. We will communicate the results to a research audience in open access journal articles in the fields of transgender studies, family studies and language and gender, and in three Masters theses focusing on Māori, Pacific and Asian experiences, by students from these cultural groups.

As the first discourse-based work on family support for transgender youth, this project will advance knowledge in the interdisciplinary fields of transgender studies (contributing a youth-centred, strengths-based, and intersectional perspective), family studies (decolonising concepts of family and foregrounding family resilience) and the sociolinguistic discipline of language and gender (exploring how visual and verbal discourse is employed for social change). It will deepen and widen our understanding of family support for transgender young people at a time of pressing need, providing valuable insights to those who seek to be part of the village that raises a transgender child.