US LGBT population at 3.4 percent: Study

In a special report released yesterday, Gallup revealed that 3.4 percent of 121,290 interviewees responded "yes" to the question, "Do you, personally, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender?"

The question was included in Gallup's daily tracking interviews with US adults, specifically those from June 1 to Sept. 30 of this year. 

"This is the largest single study of the distribution of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) population in the US. on record," Gallup's Gary Gates and Frank Newport explained in the release. 

Additionally, 4.4 percent of respondents said they did not know, or refused to respond to the question. 

According to the survey, nonwhite Americans were more likely to identify as LGBT, comprising about one-third of the "yes" respondents. On top were African-Americans with 4.6 percent identifying as LGBT, followed by 4.0 percent of Hispanics and 4.3 percent of Asians. The 3.2 percent of white respondents identifying as LGBT brought down the average. 

Other insights of the data include that female respondents were more likely to identify as LGBT, and those respondents were just as likely to be raising children as non-LGBT women: around 32 percent of both "yes" and "no" respondents reported having children under 18 in the home. This was not true of male LGBT respondents, who were around half as likely to be raising children as other men. 

Some data contradicted past studies, like the statistic that most adults identifying as LGBT do not hold college degrees: 40 percent of those with some college education but no degree identified as LGBT, along with 3.5 percent of those with a high school education or less. On the other hand, only 2.8 percent of respondents with a college degree and 3.2 percent of those with postgraduate work identified as LGBT. 

However, other data, such as that indicating that of LGBT-identifying adults 35 percent have less than $24,000 of income per year, as compared to 24 percent of all Americans, was not surprising to experts. Similarly unsurprising to demographers was that younger respondents were far more likely to identify as LGBT: 6.4 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds picked "yes."