Data is collected by our team of research fellows who perform a comprehensive audit of institutions’ policy manuals (including student-athlete handbooks) and their official athletics websites to identify publicly evidenced policies and practices on LGBTQ inclusion at every NCAA D-I institution, and a growing number of D-II and D-III institutions.

The eight policies and practices measured here have been empirically proven to impact the experiences of the LGBTQ community. Every athletic department in the sample has been contacted regularly with the opportunity to offer publicly available evidence of accessible policies, resources, and trainings to staff, fans, and student-athletes.

Our research fellows continue to reach out to campus leaders at every institution to confirm the accuracy of their scores. At a minimum, four individuals from each institution (the Athletic Director, Senior Woman Administrator, most senior athletic staff member for compliance, and most senior institutional staff member for LGBTQ inclusion) have been contacted and asked to make the research team aware of any policies or practices that were not previously identified.

Official scores on the AEI website are updated monthly. Every institution’s AEI score is audited by the research fellows yearly. Scores are audited more frequently for athletic departments in contact with research fellows about updated evidence, or for athletic departments that schedule consulting conversations with the research team.

Methodology update as of July 2023: If AEI evidence (or the document or page containing the evidence) has a visible time-stamp, date range of application, or departmental review date, such time-stamps must be dated within the last 2 calendar years to qualify for scoring purposes. Evidence that is explicitly timestamped more than 2 calendar years before an institution’s annual audit cannot be reasonably assumed to remain unchanged in its application to current students unless explicitly stated by the athletic department. We use calendar years to make these distinctions; for example, a 2020-2021 student-athlete handbook is acceptable evidence for an audit conducted in 2023, but would not be acceptable for an audit conducted in 2024.