Deep Canvassing to Reduce Transphobia

During the summer of 2015, volunteers from the Los Angeles LGBT Center Leadership LAB and SAVE "deep canvassed" conservative neighborhoods of South Florida in an attempt to decrease transphobia and increase support for transgender-inclusive non-discrimination laws.

We conducted an independent experimental evaluation to determine the effectiveness of this deep canvassing program. Before launching the experiment, the LAB and SAVE spent nearly six months canvassing on transphobia in order to develop the script ultimately used in the experiment. Only after cycling through 11 scripts and reaching a point where the LAB and SAVE were confident, based on their observations during the canvasses, did we conduct the experiment.

Here is a sample conversation:

The experiment we conducted had four steps:

  1. We recruited voters to join an online survey panel, which we called the 2015 Miami Opinion Study sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley. The voters were recruited via mail sent to the address at which they were registered to vote. This mail directed them to an online survey. We randomly assigned these voters to receive the deep canvass (treatment) or to a recycling conversation (placebo) to serve as a comparison group.
  2. Volunteers from the LAB and SAVE conducted the canvass, delivering either the transphobia deep canvass or a placebo conversation depending on the voter’s random assignment. Voters do not realize the canvassing is connected to the survey in any way.
  3. We invited voters who were successfully reached to take a follow-up survey one week later.
  4. We then invited voters to participate in several follow-up surveys to measure the long-term effects.

We found that the deep canvass conversations substantially reduced transphobia, with decreases greater than Americans’ average decrease in homophobia from 1998 to 2012. These effects persisted for 3 months, and both transgender and nontransgender canvassers were effective. The intervention also increased support for a nondiscrimination law, even after exposing voters to counterarguments.

If you are interested in more details, read the full academic article, "Durably reducing transphobia: A field experiment on door-to-door canvassing." Summaries are also availabe from the New York Times, This American Life, and FiveThiryEight.