Conducting research into bisexuality and bi experience?
There are a number of local and national organisations and publications you may be thinking of contacting to help you find interviewees, whether from those organisations or as a route to find people in the wider bisexual population.
When you ask them for help, many bi organisations in the UK and abroad will quote the Bi Research Guidelines and ask whether your work will be in line with these. If they’re on the ball they’ll include asking how you intend to communicate your findings back to the community – for example through print publications Bi Community News, BiJou or the Journal of Bisexuality.
The guidelines seek both to advise on how to produce better publications and data for the researcher, and to improve how findings are shared and understood by bisexual people and organisations working with and for them.
We strongly recommend familiarising yourself with the guidelines, working with them and so improving the value of research into bisexual people’s experience.
The guidelines were proposed by Jen Yockney on the Academic Bi email list on 3 July 2010. Their first edition was written by Jen and appeared online in June 2011 and the current version was first published in print in Bi Community News in February 2012. They can also be academically cited with reference to their later publication in the Journal of Bisexuality: (reference: Barker, M., Richards, C., Jones, R., Bowes-Catton, H., Plowman, T. & Yockney, J., (2012). Guidelines for researching and writing about bisexuality. Journal of Bisexuality 12, (3), 376-392.)