Qadgop's Doper Sexuality study

In My Humble Opinion
1

OK, I’m an idiot. I promised waaay too much. I was gonna combine 3 threads surveying doper sexuality and pool the data. Guess what? That’s a HELL of a lot of work. And my employer seems to think I should not do such tasks while at work. And the wife and kids and dog want some attention at home. Cross-checking over 600 poster names, figuring out which gender they are, and updating results is a big PITA!!

So. Here’s what I’ve got so far. Just the results from my study of last month. 168 male doper and 140 female doper replies. Raw data only so far, no analysis or comparison to other populations. But if I put it off until it’s all done, I’ll never get it back to you all. So here’s some raw data to play with so far.

To refresh the memory, here’s the Kinsey scale:

From: Kinsey Scale
0 - exclusively heterosexual
1 - predominantly heterosexual, incidentally homosexual
2 - predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual
3 - equally heterosexual and homosexual
4 - predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual
5 - predominantly homosexual, incidentally heterosexual
6 - exclusively homosexual

It is necessary to consider a variety of activities in assessing an individual’s ranking on the continuum:
· fantasies · dreams · thoughts
· frequency of sexual activities · emotional feelings

Therefore, many “heterosexuals” would fall, in fact, somewhere between 0 and 3 because they occasionally think/dream/fantasize about sexual activities with members of the same gender and/or occasionally act on these feelings.

I had to take a few liberties with the reported Kinsey numbers. Too many fractions were reported, and I couldn’t in good faith round to the nearest whole number. 2.5 doesn’t represent equally hetero and homo, so I rounded it down to 2. At the same time, 0.25 is not exclusively hetero, so up it went to 1. And so on.

Anyway, of the 168 males,
68 (41%) reported 0
55 (33%) reported 1
21 (13%) reported 2
00 (00%) reported 3
02 (01%) reported 4
11 (07%) reported 5
11 (07%) reported 6

Of the 140 females,
24 (17%) reported 0
58 (41%) reported 1
32 (23%) reported 2
09 (06%) reported 3
05 (04%) reported 4
11 (08%) reported 5
01 (01%) reported 6

If anyone’s good with Excel or other spreadsheets and wants to plug these into graph and table forms, feel free. I hope to add the other earlier Kinsey thread data to them eventually and compare them to other populations, but I must be honest and report I don’t know when I’ll get to it.

I’m not going to draw any conclusions yet, other than to note that women seem to be a bit more inclined to report sexual thoughts or actions with other women than men do with men. (Big surprise, eh?) :rolleyes:

Again, sorry for the delay, and I’ll try to throw in some prison stories next time too.

2

The low number of females reporting 0 is interesting.

3

Just for the heck of it, here is a quick page I did with two graphs.

The low number of females reporting 6 is also interesting.

4

Woo! Hoo! I’m almost unique!

5

Interestingly, it looks like the male results are more polarized than the female ones.

6

Has there ever been another study that used this scale? Surely the Kinsey Institute must have done one?

7

Yeah, Quonk, but in both cases there’s a large cluster around the “mostly straight” side and another large cluster around the “mostly gay” side, with almost nobody, of either gender, in between. Isn’t the theoretical scale supposed to be exactly the opposite of that, with a Poisson distribution?

8

Fascinating. Thanks for the work. And I understand. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to change my goals because what I assumed would be a linear increase indifficulty turned out to be exponential.

9

A Poisson distribution is pretty asymmetrical. Perhaps you’re thinking of a normal distribution?

Anyway, I always thought that the theory called for a t-distribution, skewed so that more people are attracted to the opposite sex than their own.

10

Well it could be a normal distribution. I think the 1-7 scale is not the right way to scale it to find that. If you were measure on, say, a 1-3 scale where 1 was totally straight OR totally gay with that distnction made, and 3 being almost completely bisexual, then you could place the totally straight and totally gay back to back on the graph to produce a somewhat normal distribution…

11

I think you have a bigger problem in your data collection.

What you don’t know is if certain people are pre-disposed to responding to these surveys. Since the volunteers are coming to you, that is likely to skew your data.

As a curious measure of how people of the SD respond to these things, you migh have something. I doubt you could consider this scientifically sound, though.

Just a thought.

12

That seems a bit artificial, since it ignores the fact that bisexual people are more similar to either of the extremes than one extreme is to another.

13

cmosdes … of course this poll is skewed in a certain way. It is virtually impossible to eliminate bias in any polling system. You could argue that random samples drawn from the general population for political polls are skewed because not everyone has a telephone. There are many many many biases that are possible in any given polling situation. As long as you recognize these limitations and lay them out openly, as well as telling your standard error, etc then alot of polls serve a purpose. This one is no different. It is clearly skewed to those in society who hae access to a pc and internet connection, and dare I say on this board that it is skewed towards the more intelligent in society. so of course it is not scientifically as accurate as it could be, but since the original intent imho was to see how fellow Dopers fit into the scale, the accuracy may not be that far off, statistically speaking. Not all dopes have to answer, and in fact I would say that 400 or so responses would give you a +/- 5% 19/20 times, well within normal confidence ranges.

14

Considering you can fit (almost) any three points exactly with a normal curve, I have to agree. :wink:

15

ultrafilter: point taken. I was just showing how the distribution might be normalized, though it wouldn’t be the best representation. I know that the tails of the distribution would have more in common with eachother than with the mean. I jsut wanted to show how to make a pretty bell :slight_smile:

16

The pattern certainly fits with what I recall from my reading in the late 80s: Men more polarized than woman, and very few “total bisexsuals” at three, especially for men. QtM, what’s interesting to me is the former point. You point out that “women seem to be a bit more inclined to report sexual thoughts or actions with other women than men do with men.” But I see something somewhat different (and badly worded, sorry): men report fewer sexual thoughts or actions with the gender opposite to their primary orientation. Straight guys are less likely to report attraction to men, * and gay guys to women.* How many times have I seen fags who - without irony - wrinkle their noses and mutter about “fish” at the suggestion of sex with a woman? Proportionately, it may not be that much less than straight guys who react similarly to gay male sex.

17

Well, I never said the results would be an ultimate answer on the order of 42 or anything! :slight_smile: It basically just surveyed those people willing to respond.

As for what the results mean? Well, I tried to find some similar studies of other populations, and didn’t uncover a heck of a lot similar to this attempted study of mine. Either there was more info taken, along the lines of dividing the experiences and Kinsey scores into peri and post-adolescent behavior, or just a hell of a lot of arguing about how the conclusions didn’t mean anything, or if they did mean something, it wasn’t what the person doing the study said they mean.

In short, the only thing notable about the study I could come up with was that it pretty much mirrors some studies done on more general white populations in america: Lotsa guys reporting zeros, fewer women doing so. The one notable thing about this population was the few people, especially men, reporting “3”, or pure bisexual. But the numbers here are still within the margin of error, given the small nature of the survey.

It is interesting that the numbers of people reporting 5 & 6 (or predominantly homosexual) do add up to about 10% for both sexes. That figure has been debated ad nauseum in the literature.

So basically I’m sick of the topic, (and who thought I’d get sick of talking about sex?) and any future studies I undertake here will be better planned, and probably involve just surveying the ladies about their sexual preferences and practices (it helps if you love your work).

Oh yeah! The sex in prison story.

At one of the woman’s prisons in our state, a female inmate accused another inmate of having sex with a particular guard. Since the claim was not proved, the inmate was found guilty of “lying about staff” and sent to solitary confinement for a year.

Meanwhile, the other inmate, who was accused of having sex with the guard, turned up pregnant! She eventually admits to having sex with the guard, and gets sent to solitary for a year for “soliciting staff”.

The guard who impregnated her was immediately terminated from his job. But unfortunately our state is one of only 4 in the nation where a corrections officer having sex with a prisoner is not a crime. (BTW, it is a crime for a health care professional to have sex with an inmate, or any patient under their care.) So he’s jobless but walks, and two women are doing a year in solitary because of misbehavior between the officer and the inmate.

Not real sexy, huh? Well, that’s real life in prison. Where sexual relations are generally in the categories of pathetic, degrading, and dangerous.

Fortunately the solitary confinement judgements are being re-evaluated (thanks to media pressure) and the legislature is looking into criminalizing such behavior (thanks again to media behavior).

18

I suggest that the results reflect stories told by society.
Zero men reported equally hetero/homosexual, number 3.
This seems unlikely to me. I think that both the hetero and gay communities have strong identities and advocates. I don’t know of anything that reflects a purely bisexual orientation in our culture. Because there are no public models of equivalent attraction (whatever the term should be), and no stories told about such people in the media, nobody identifies with it. I suspect that the bimodal nature of the curve is false, but it does reflect how society has polarized our identities.
In other words, if you’re really bi you probably wouldn’t know it.

19

:confused:
I think, if half the time I climbed into bed with somebody, there was an extra penis involved, I’d have noticed.

I sure hope I would have noticed!

I responded as “0” to the poll, btw.

20

Qagdop - What about pre-natal care and labour & delivery for pregnant inmates? Will the prisoner get to keep her child in prison, or will the disgraced guard/father get it? And why wouldn’t they let the vindicated inmate out of solitary when they found out the truth?

StG