Confidentiality

ABOUT

Identifying and living as a Queer Muslim can be complex in the many communities of belonging, especially with family, kin, work, and with friends. There are many ways of being queer, trans, and non-binary, as well as being Muslim—there is no one right way. The research team is comprised of individuals who are also queer and non-binary Muslims. Also, there are Muslim and Queer allies on the team. So, we welcome your intersectional lived experiences and would love to chat with you about your experiences with family and kin on being queer.

It is totally okay if you are not out with family and friends, and it is totally okay if you are out as well.  The research team will protect your privacy and will not disclose your name, not out you to your family members, or give away information about your gender identity and expression or sexual identity. We collect this information to track who we are talking to and how we can respectfully address you during the interview. All of the information which has your name and contact information will only be seen by the research assistant and Maryam Khan (a Queer Muslim) who is the principal researcher.

In the event we end up interviewing you and your family member/kin, these interviews will happen separately, and we won’t share with your family member/kin that we have interviewed you and vice versa. All interviews will be conducted separately. It would be awesome if you and your family members and kin would agree to be interviewed.

If you have any concerns after reading this page:

Please e-mail the principal investigator, Maryam Khan, at mkhan@wlu.ca

We want to make sure you are as comfortable as possible!

Incognito mode

If you are concerned about someone being aware of your browsing history, we recommend that you surf this website using incognito mode on your browser. If you forget to use incognito mode, you can also clear your browsing history after visiting this website. For other ways to keep cyber-safe and learn about privacy tips, check out this website (https://hackblossom.org/cybersecurity/).  

Interviewing virtual platform

Until pandemic restrictions are lifted, the interviews will be conducted virtually. We are primarily using Zoom for Healthcare to conduct our interviews. This will require you to download Zoom software. This platform has been recommended and approved by the Wilfrid Laurier University Information and Communications Technologies department for type 3 restricted data, which includes research interviews. Please note that screen capture and closed captioning is not available with this version of Zoom to protect confidentiality. If there are accessibility concerns around this, you can e-mail us to let us know. Please see the following instructions on Zoom on how to download the platform and how to get started as a new user: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360034967471-Getting-started-guide-for-new-users 

Generic e-mail address

We have created a generic e-mail address so that the specific goal of this study is not obvious, or that is related to queer Muslims.

Code word

If you are in a situation when you are living with family and your family is not aware of your sexuality or gender identity and expression, you can connect with us beforehand and we can discuss the use of a code-word. This code-word can be used at any point during the interview, to signal to the researcher that you would like us to change the topic of discussion right away. Example: we decide on the code-word “blue”. So as we are going through the interview questions, and the researcher hears you say the word “blue”, the researcher will immediately change the topic and start discussing a research assignment for school.