How the Study Works

Trans PULSE Canada is a national survey that collected data over the course of ten weeks in the summer of 2019. The survey could be completed in English or French online, on paper, or via telephone (with a language interpreter in another language). Eleven peer Research Associates (PRAs) were hired to promote the survey online and in larger metropolitan areas.  PRAs also met participants in-person to collect data on tablets.

To participate, you had to be age 14 or over (no upper limit!), live in Canada and identify as a gender other than what you were assigned at birth. That’s it; you didn’t have to have a particular identity, be on hormones, or live your daily life in your true gender.

There were two versions of the Trans PULSE Canada survey: the full survey and a short form. The full survey included all of the information on your health, health care experiences, social experiences, and questions designed to inform policy and practice. It’s long because community members and policy makers really felt we needed to get data to support changes in everything from immigration policy to sex work policy to health care access for gender-affirming, primary emergency, and long-term care. We estimated that it would take 70 minutes to complete, though time varied depending on whether you could skip certain sections. Once you opened the survey, you could save and exit, then complete it any time until the end of summer. For those who were not willing or able to complete the standard full survey, there was a 10-minute short form available. This included demographics and a single key question from each major content area. Data from this version will serve two purposes: it will include those key questions that are presented for all provinces/territories and priority populations in the initial series of reports, and it will allow us to produce statistical weights for the analyses we do using only full survey data. This allows us to adjust the results if some demographic groups may be less likely to complete a long survey.

Survey data was collected in the summer of 2019, and the first series of reports (on each province/region and for each priority population) will be returned to the community in the winter of 2019, along with infographics highlighting some of the results. Over the following two years, a large number of academic papers, slide sets (that anyone can incorporate in trainings or presentations), community reports, and infographics will be released.

You could participate anonymously, or you could provide contact information at the end of the survey if you were willing to be contacted with opportunities to participate in future research. Our Indigenous Leadership Group planned a follow-up study using Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies, team members have discussed a more general one-year follow-up, and other teams of trans and cis researchers have designed potential follow-ups either for their province (e.g., Saskatchewan, BC) or on particular issues (e.g., employment, blood donation). Whether or not participants chose to provide information for recontact was up to them,  but we will never share anyone’s information. We will contact our participants on behalf of other groups, and they can choose whether to contact them.

You can see the survey online here!