Hello and welcome to the Big Five podcast from Northumbria psychology department, where we learn big facts about human behavior and experience. My name is Dr. Genavee Brown and I'll be your guide into the minds of psychology students, alumni and researchers at Northumbria University. I'm a lecturer and social psychology researcher in the psychology department and I love learning more about all fields of psychology. Each week on this podcast, I'll speak to a guest who is either student, alumni or researcher in the Northumbria psychology department. By asking them five big questions, we'll learn about their time studying psychology, and hopefully learn some big facts about human behavior and experience. Hi, Richard.
Hi, Genavee. How you doing?
I'm doing very well. Today I have the pleasure of speaking to Richard Rawlings, a PhD student in the department who is studying how people living in rural and urban locations use dating websites, such as Grindr, Tinder, many other options out there. So Richard, would you like to tell us a bit on your research about how queer people are using these apps and why you got interested in this topic in the first place?
So I'll answer the second part of the question. First, I got interested in looking at kind of social connection in the countryside among LGBTQ plus people. Mainly during lockdown, I grew up in a village myself, I was driving in the middle of lockdown over quite large parts of countryside to get to and from work. And I think, like many good ideas of people who drive cars, being on an empty motorway, or being on empty roads, got me got me thinking and wondering, and I sort of wondered, with the tech, technological changes that we've had, in the sort of 15 years or so since I was growing up in a village where you met other queer people by going to a nearby city venue. I was interested in how these technologies like treating hookups really as people nearby applications, and I'll say more on that in a minute. But how these technologies bring people together and wherever it is still necessary to move to a city in order to meet other like minded people, because that certainly used to be the case, to a large extent, in terms of the other parts of the question. So what's quite interesting is, when I first started doing my literature review, one of the early studies looked at older websites like gaydar, which is now mainly out of use, which people knew there's a website for people to find sexual partners. But a study in Australia noticed a kind of blending of motives. And the people were kind of sorts of using this technology for a wide range of things. So I think there's some time all people to an extent, have been finding ways to make technology work for them, while apps like Grindr are marketed more as friend finding apps. But then when you look at the actual setup of the apps, the way it's a grid of pictures of humans the way it takes certain data of people. It's kind of known more as a hook apart. But actually, some of the participants in my study in that they're using this for a range of things. They're finding friends doing things like moving to a new city, meeting people for friendship through apps, like Grindr, and then meet friends. And some of them are not. And that's that's what we're starting to unpick because a lot of the studies so far look at least technologies and cities, which makes sense, that's that's where they're most used. But actually, geography is interesting in relation to technology, we says, people nearby applications have different complexity and in say, parts of the countryside where people live further apart, and may have have different access to transport or space, for instance.
So you mentioned the study that you're doing for your PhD. Can you tell us a bit about methods that you've used to collect that data?
Initially, I needed to find people, particularly people in the countryside to interview or to respond by survey. So we use two methods in a way to collect the same data. One was they could fill out the answers in an online form. And the other was they could have an interview with me, the questions were the same. And the idea of this was so that people who maybe felt they didn't want to talk about intimate things where the researcher could fill this out on line and that might feel more comfortable for. But finding the participants was was the first bit of the math that there was quite difficult. This was because there are lots of lists of LGBT organizations, but they're mainly tied to cities. And I thought if I went via these organizations, I would find mainly city participants for my first study. So what I actually did this time last year, while I was thinking of how to recruit I, the pride film came to mind. And in an early scene of the film pride, they raised some money in a pride march in the 70s, I think maybe the 80s in the 80s. And they need to, they want to donate this to some coal miners in a rural area. So we used to, they used the map and the phonebook to basically find local local trade unions in order to find someone to donate this money to because at the time, the National Trade Union would not accept money from an LGBT organization. So I got the off common list of area codes for the UK, I then looked up the town or area corresponding to that area code and put this into into Google, followed by keywords like gay. And slowly over a couple of weeks doing this for every town or area in the UK, compiled a list of local groups or potential contacts and then reached out to them recruitment stage. And, yeah, this actually works very well, because initially, I'd struggled to recruit but by using this database method of forming my own database, we got 38 participants in the study for in London, 10 in towns and cities across the UK, and 24, at town, village, or isolated. So this will be the sort of first kind of qualitative study of rural and urban queer social interaction across the whole of the UK. To my knowledge, I might be wrong here. But there are previous studies that look at one rural area, and there are previous studies that look at one or multiple cities. But this is the first one that's had had reach across, I think all the regions pretty much, maybe not the southwest of England, but every other region. So my advice to other PhD students would be trust some of your ideas. And, and just go with that. I know, when I did spend two weeks making a database, I thought, well, well will always be a waste of time will anyone will only one respond, but it works. So that's that's been brilliant. Yeah.
You had some excellent responses and some really rich data from what I hear, would you be able to share with our listeners a bit about the results, anything interesting or surprising that you found maybe differences between urban and rural or maybe surprising similarities?
The key thing I think, is that this idea that things are better in the cities is not necessarily true. Barry Gray, who's scholar in the States has critiqued this and said that cities, the the achievement of cities, as LGBTQ, kind of celebrated and safe spaces relies on the rural being some other place, some kind of nowhere. And and she challenges this with her own research, looking at rural communities in the States. And some of my participants have chosen to move to rural areas. They, some of them were with financial and other resources to still kind of commute back to the city to socialize. But other people with fewer financial and time and other resources have also chosen to live in the countryside. They're sometimes balancing multiple parts of our identity like disability with, say, LGBTQ status. And certainly people say that healthcare is more accessible in the countryside with shorter wait times, but they're not always balancing different parts of their identity. And some of them are very pleasantly surprised by rural areas being better than expected. So some of those of people who grew up grew up in those areas. So what might one trans participants who did actually move to a city They come out in a city and transition or start their transition in a city, because they didn't feel comfortable in our village, where they were they thought people would at least gossip was very pleasantly surprised with the response they got in the village. So I mean, it's qualitative data, that small samples, but other participants have been surprised at how much is going on in towns, for example, for LGBTQ people. So I think what's starting to emerge is people are starting to see that with technological advancements, they can find other people who are local in rural areas. But the idea that reality is unwelcoming is its persistence. But some of the people in my study find things better than expected. So that's the I mean, that's the most important thing in some ways. But then a number of smaller things kind of happen. So yeah, early research that sort of talked about kind of gay scenes and metropolitan areas, attracting kind of diverse people from elsewhere. That's certainly true. We see a lot of people commuting socially, we see. We see participants who've migrated, rural to urban as well as urban to rural, some of this fits with earlier research. There was a paper about going out and coming back, I think of Spanish. Again, a qualitative study, but that sort of said, yes, a lot of people do migrate to cities and, and come out there and come of age, but actually, a lot of most people return to, to places that they may be from, or places that are like where they're from. And we've seen a little bit of that. And then you do see some perhaps more, I want to say stereotypical differences. So in places like Leeds and London, you do see discussions around issues such as camera sex, such as use of drugs, to kind of facilitate social and sexual interaction. And that doesn't, that doesn't feature in a town, village, rural or small city or immediate medium city, participants discussions. Again, it's small scale data, because it's qualitative, and there's 30 of them. So we can't necessarily draw patterning conclusion from this. But it does suggest that maybe some of the things that make the news a little bit more on the moral panic around some of these apps, maybe may be warranted in some places, and some people may be falling into harm and issues around around some of these things. This is by no means watts, large numbers of people are saying they come across or find angles on these apps. And then I think one of the other key things is the resources that people need to engage in social interaction. Again, a little bit more predictable, but just the way these dynamics are different in the city, or the countryside. In the countryside, possibly quite predictably. Participants talk about transport, they talk about facing discrimination on transport, they talk about transport not running on time, access to a car being needed, but also holding them back if they want to go out drinking, and city, some of them talk about shared housing and the different aspects of shared housing for developing kind of social and more intimate relationships. So compared to one participant discussing family in a rural area, wondering what time she'll be home or where, where she's going. So different resources seem necessary in perhaps predictable way to take part in interaction depending on on scale. And then I think the the other perhaps more predictable thing. Well, maybe not maybe not so predictable. But if you do super design of different digital technologies influencing what people do with them, so what are lots of people said that they made a diverse kind of relationship, from friendships to one off hookups via people nearby applications. So hookup apps like Grindr. Most people found that these apps did not help them to maintain relationships. It could be awkward logging on it It tells other people you're online when you're not looking for a hookup or you don't want people to know that. People found private messaging technologies like WhatsApp, and social media much better for maintaining relationships. And actually, while people did find making friends of friends via hookup apps, quite a good strategy for building friendship networks when they found themselves in a new place. Things like Facebook, and even online forums like Mumsnet overwhelmingly positively bring people together around shared hobbies, and interests, whether that's LGBTQ sports groups, forms of queer feminism, and so on people in in, in both rural and urban areas where we're making quite lasting kind of connections, and maintaining these via Apps that gave them more of a story where they could see other people's interests and groups and where they could participate. This has two complications. And I think the the one complication that's, that's very interesting that emerges from people liking some of these technologies that have more of a story is some participants who were not out about their sexuality or who were only out to some people, especially in the countryside, they've mentioned things such as that you can, for instance, you can you can tell whether someone's LGBTQ or not from who they follow, or what their interests are. So some did raise kind of privacy concerns around these things. And, again, one person in a village saying that they've matched with their own scout leader on Grindr. So there are scalar issues in the countryside, with apps and social medias. In terms of, you're more likely to bump into on these apps, I guess, people who might not have talked about your sexuality. So a lot of these technologies complicate the strategic forms of outlets, people use to separate different spheres of our lives. And that's already in the literature. But that may be a particular issue for some in the countryside who are still deciding who they want to share their sexuality with.
Yeah, definitely. That's fascinating. Yeah, but all in all, LGBTQ people are able to use these apps, both to find sexual and romantic connection, but also to find friendship networks, and then they're able to leverage other types of social media in order to kind of maintain those friendships and find special interest groups and things that they might want to engage with long term. So that's, that's really positive, I think. So where do you hope to go from here with this study?
So I think there are a couple next steps we bet in first, exactly, as you've said, many, many people, particularly in places that are traditionally seen as, as a little bit devoid of meaningful LGBTQ social connections, are using these apps in meaningful ways. But I think some are still struggling a little bit. So some participants talk about delete, and reinstall cycles of apps like Grindr when they feel like something is missing. Or I'm spending a lot of time on the app, and it's not leading to meeting these these are things that participants in cities say, as well. I think sir, two things now really, it would be nice to try and find out what kind of patterns a little bit among these technologies. I'm not really a quant researcher. So I may or may not do this. But it would be good to see if, for instance, certain things in the countryside or in cities, or certain ways the apps you use, there's already some literature about this, but not not really in the countryside contribute to people being more or less happy and measuring that somehow. And I think the other thing is wherever we look at measuring this or not, is to say okay, well, why are some people getting more mean tractions from these than others? Is it app design? Or is it I think I'm possibly more interested in the kind of individual and level so how can we communicate some of the ways that people are succeeding having meaningful interaction with these, perhaps to other other LGBTQ people living in rural areas. So actually, if we are finding that the countryside can be a fulfilling place, let's tell other people. So let's design an intervention. Or let's design an educational resource that tells people what we found. So that people may be moved to the city if they want to move on if they don't, but they think they need to. So it's Yeah, to next steps. Really, let's, let's look at what other ways we can we can measure and evidence, some of these findings. And let's look at how we can use this data to support people who are coming to these technologies now, and and coming to these places now, to get the best out out of these, and fewer of the less pleasurable or riskier.
Yeah, that sounds like a excellent goal moving forward. One of the things I wanted to ask you about, I think you've touched on it already. But for my last question, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about how we might apply these results in the real world to make LGBTQ people's lives better?
Well, I'm just saying, I think we can do a number of things, actually. So I was just thinking about how to answer it. But I think the first thing we can do is we take some of the things that emerge from the data, such as the discrimination people facing in, in various areas, but that seems more in rural areas where people, one participant, for instance, was described discriminated against on transport, because of previously cross dressing on transport, and then was basically unable to access all transport from their isolated area. Whereas if that happened in a city, and one driver on one bus route didn't like you, you could you, you probably wouldn't see the same driver. So I think the first thing we can do is draw attention to the issue that there are still real problems that people face, I think there can be improvements made to apps, I guess I'm a little bit skeptical here and dollars in mistakes, talk about these apps being designed, often for cities, and often by big companies in quite unaccountable ways. So I'm not I'm not sure how improvements that we had for apps would necessarily be turned into things that we used at scale for people. I think you can talk to people who come into contact with LGBTQ people, whether that's kind of sexual health clinics, teachers about the results, I think there's a big emphasis on research impact now. So kind of writing things up not just as an academic article or as a thesis, but in ways that are accessible to a wider audience, and could support for example, teachers, and other workers who come into contact with people to support them in, I guess, more meaningful ways, I think, because this idea that things are better in the city is so dominant, I am not sure how much people are supported to stay, to stay in areas if that's better for them, so I think supporting other adults to kind of intervene at the decision making point in terms of what people really want and how we can, how we can build things for them where they want them instead of instead of elsewhere.
Well, thank you so much, Richard, for sharing your research with us in honor of LGBTQ plus, my pleasure, Is there anywhere that people can follow you online or keep up with your project as you continue your research,
so it needs updating. But there's a website queerrural.uk, where you can find out a little bit about the project, you can sign up to take part in any of the studies and the results. Once that button up will be visible there as well.
Excellent. So I'll put that web address in the show notes. I hope you've liked this episode. If you would like to follow the podcast and stay up to date on new episodes. You can follow us on Instagram and Twitter @TheBig5_psych. If you'd like to learn more about Northumbria psychology, check out our psychology department blog at Northumbriapsy.com. You can also follow Northumbria psychology on Twitter @NorthumbriaPSY. If you'd like to be interviewed on the podcast or know someone who would, please email us at TheBig5.psych@gmail.com Finally, if you'd like the podcast, make sure to subscribe to our podcasts on your listening app and give us a review and ratings. I hope you've learned something on this voyage into the mind. Take care. Until next time,
