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Additional analysis of the asexual community census


Siggy

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Here's a little project I was working on while AVEN was down. I volunteered to do some analysis of the 2011 Asexual Awareness Week Community Census, and the results were published a couple years ago. But I and other volunteers have been sitting on some additional analysis which has remained unpublished. I was recently motivated to present a small selection on the AVENwiki:

http://www.asexuality.org/wiki/index.php?title=2011_AAW_Community_Census

Included inside:

-About 60% of the asexual community is in the US.

-Among people in the US, White people are over-represented.

-Among people in the US, non-religious people are over-represented.

-Gray-As and demisexuals are more likely to be romantic.

-Some people who are repulsed are nonetheless willing to have sex.

-A brief discussion of “satisficing”, the main problem with the survey’s design.

Any questions about the survey or analysis should be directed to me.

Also, a reminder that AVENwiki is still a thing, and needs volunteers like YOU to help maintain it.

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That is some interesting analysis, but I think you mean that about 60% of the English asexual community is in the US, since there are non-English speakers who can't finish the survey.

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You are correct, Robin. My mistake.

There's probably also a bias towards particular asexual communities. There were actually more respondents from Tumblr than AVEN, but I'm not sure that means that Tumblr was actually bigger than AVEN in 2011. It could just mean that Tumblr was more successful at marketing the survey.

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Lord Happy Toast

The finding about black people being underrepresented among the American survey takers is something that warrants further investigation. (The first question is whether these findings replicate in better designed surveys.) Assuming this is a real finding, the first possible explanation that occurred to me is that perhaps it simply reflected internet usage more generally. So I looked for information about race and internet usage in the US, and I found that earlier this year Pew Research published a report on African Americans and Technology Use. In summary, they found:

African Americans have long been less likely than whites to use the internet and to have high speed broadband access at home, and that continues to be the case. Today, African Americans trail whites by seven percentage points when it comes to overall internet use (87% of whites and 80% of blacks are internet users), and by twelve percentage points when it comes to home broadband adoption (74% of whites and 62% of blacks have some sort of broadband connection at home). At the same time, blacks and whites are on more equal footing when it comes to other types of access, especially on mobile platforms.

However, more detailed analysis revealed that, for the 18-29 age group in their sample, internet use and having broadband at home were pretty comparable for white people and black people in their survey, and the overall difference largely comes from older individuals. Given that the large majority of AVENites are 29 or younger, this suggests to me that differences in internet usage (for the variables they looked at) couldn't account for this. Of course, this still leave open the possibility of racial differences in what people do on the internet. The info about this given in the report (i.e. black people are more likely to use twitter than white people, and the difference is pretty much entirely from differences in usage among the 18-29 age bracket) doesn't shed much light here.

You are correct, Robin. My mistake.

There's probably also a bias towards particular asexual communities. There were actually more respondents from Tumblr than AVEN, but I'm not sure that means that Tumblr was actually bigger than AVEN in 2011. It could just mean that Tumblr was more successful at marketing the survey.

Based on the recruiting for one of the surveys I did for my dissertation (the one with the most responses), I think that this is a big part of it. Tumblr's reblogging system allows for getting lots of publicity for the survey quickly (at least if it's something that people on tumblr find interesting and decide to reblog). By contrast, I suspect that AVENites tend to just check a few forums on a regular basis and (presumably) a lot of people don't check announcements very often.
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Maybe you can be interested in AVENes (AVEN in spanish) sourveys. When the 2014 one finishes I want to translate the results (and some of the 2013 ones) and bring them here. And we want to prepare other useful questions for 2015.

Here are the previous results: http://asexuality.org/sp/encuestas

Now I'm trying to find the Lori Brotto and Morag Yule survey resoults.

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Lord Happy Toast

Maybe you can be interested in AVENes (AVEN in spanish) sourveys. When the 2014 one finishes I want to translate the resoults (and some of the 2013 ones) and bring them here. And we want to prepare other useful questions for 2015.

Here are the previous resoults: http://asexuality.org/sp/encuestas

I think it would be good if they were made more visible/accessible on English AVEN. For a while, I've been wanting English AVEN to run an annual survey (progress is being made in developing one, though it's slow...), and it was just a few months ago that I first learned that Spanish AVEN has already been doing this for a few years now. I read the write ups, and thought they were pretty interesting. I also found that it wasn't that hard for me to read them, especially with the aid of Google translate on a few occasions.

This was rather surprising to me, given that my Spanish education is limited to stuff from Elementary and Middle school where I learned basic greetings, colors, and the alphabet. But the facts that a) it's a topic I know a lot about, and b) Romance and Germanic languages have a lot of cognates (especially for more formal or technical vocabulary) are able to go a lot farther than I would have guessed.

I first encountered this phenomenon about a decade ago while studying math. I had a friend who was reading a book in French for something he was working on. I was like, "Oh, you know French?" And he was like, "No, but the important words are basically the same as in English."

Now I'm trying to find the Lori Brotto and Morag Yule survey resoults.

You should be able to find pre-publication versions on Brotto's website.
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Maybe you can be interested in AVENes (AVEN in spanish) sourveys. When the 2014 one finishes I want to translate the resoults (and some of the 2013 ones) and bring them here. And we want to prepare other useful questions for 2015.

Speaking of which, would you be interested in holding a Spanish version of the 2014 survey? I already have a Chinese version running.

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Maybe you can be interested in AVENes (AVEN in spanish) sourveys. When the 2014 one finishes I want to translate the results (and some of the 2013 ones) and bring them here. And we want to prepare other useful questions for 2015.

Speaking of which, would you be interested in holding a Spanish version of the 2014 survey? I already have a Chinese version running.

Do you mean joining the results? It's a good idea! But did you ask the exactly same questions? Did you use google traslator to understand them or how? Because I think it's important the questions and answers to be exatly the same to get the answers together. Some times questions are ambiguos and people understand it differently or there are cultural differences (for example, the chinese years are different).

Maybe we could write the results separately in our own languages and together in english.

You had a good idea doing a chinese version! Maybe we can think together about the 2015 questionnaire.

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Maybe you can be interested in AVENes (AVEN in spanish) sourveys. When the 2014 one finishes I want to translate the results (and some of the 2013 ones) and bring them here. And we want to prepare other useful questions for 2015.

Speaking of which, would you be interested in holding a Spanish version of the 2014 survey? I already have a Chinese version running.

Do you mean joining the results? It's a good idea! But did you ask the exactly same questions? Did you use google traslator to understand them or how? Because I think it's important the questions and answers to be exatly the same to get the answers together. Some times questions are ambiguos and people understand it differently or there are cultural differences (for example, the chinese years are different).

Maybe we could write the results separately in our own languages and together in english.

You had a good idea doing a chinese version! Maybe we can think together about the 2015 questionnaire.

The 2014 survey is close to finished, so if you could get some people to translate the survey, we should get it on time.
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