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Survey of Sexual and Asexual Relationship Dynamics


JSLR

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Hi, everyone. We’ve just received approval from the Project Team to post here. Your participation or any feedback is much appreciated.

We are conducting an on-line study at Ball State University that will further our understanding of sexual and asexual relationships. The only requirements for participation in this study are that you are at least 18 years of age or older, and are in one or more romantic/sexual relationships, or have been in the past.

Participation in this research will take no longer than 20-30 minutes of your time and requires only that you complete a survey that asks questions about your relationship(s), sexual attitudes, and sexual history. Upon completion of the survey, you will have the option of providing your email address to be entered into a random drawing for a $25 Amazon electronic gift card. Two winners will be chosen no later than May 1st, 2016. Your email will not be linked to your previous survey responses. Otherwise, you will not be asked to provide any personally identifying information. Data will be collected anonymously and be held on secure password-protected devices.

If you are interested in participating in this research, please click on the link below for more information.

Principle Researcher: Courtney Dress
Graduate Student, Social Psychology
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
Email: cdress@bsu.edu

Co-researcher: Joshua L. Smith
Graduate Student, Social Psychology
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
Email: jlsmith7@bsu.edu


Faculty Advisor: Justin J. Lehmiller, Ph.D.
Department of Counseling Psychology
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
Telephone: (765) 285-8040
Email: jjlehmiller@bsu.edu

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This research request has been approved for Advertising by the Project Team.

Steph

Dedicated Research Contact.

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  • 2 weeks later...

The link seems to be broken for me, is anyone else having trouble?

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Thank you for letting us know. However, the link should be working fine. I am not sure why you were having trouble, but if this persists, let me know.

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Go figure. It worked when I copied the link over to Chrome, but it still isn't working in my Firefox. It might just be my computer then, sorry about that!

Anyways, I went through and did the survey. It's well written, but there were two or three questions I couldn't answer because I don't consider one partner to be my "primary partner". I have one girlfriend and one boyfriend, but I consider them both to be of equal standing and importance in my life... So I hope it's all right that I left those three questions blank, and answered all the others that asked about my "primary" partner as being both of them.

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Heh, well that was completely heartbreaking and re-stirred up a bunch of really awful shit for me. ;)

Wanted to put a "trigger warning" here if you've been through a bad break-up of an ace/allo relationship, esp. recently, because they ask a bunch of questions about how that happened and about how your most recent relationship makes you feel in various dimensions of your sexual/romantic health/life.

Still, interested to see the results, it's obvious that a lot of time/care went into crafting this survey. Thanks!

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Bluewildebeest

I couldn't finish the survey although I would have liked to, because I do not do "hierarchical polyamory". I do not have a primary partner. Please consider that not all polyamorous relationships are hierarchical - the survey acts on a wrong and clichéd assumption of what polyamory is.

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Heh, well that was completely heartbreaking and re-stirred up a bunch of really awful shit for me. ;)

Wanted to put a "trigger warning" here if you've been through a bad break-up of an ace/allo relationship, esp. recently, because they ask a bunch of questions about how that happened and about how your most recent relationship makes you feel in various dimensions of your sexual/romantic health/life.

Still, interested to see the results, it's obvious that a lot of time/care went into crafting this survey. Thanks!

Aceghost, your participation is appreciated as is your warning to others. I am sorry that our survey made you feel uncomfortable. Unfortunately, we thought that this might be a possibility when writing a survey that asks about relationship experiences, although we hoped it would not happen. Are you okay now?

As far as results are concerned, we do not mind sharing them here at a later date. However, it is imperative that researchers do not disseminate information that would end up being misleading/inaccurate to the public. Therefore, many results should only be made public after others in the scientific community have reviewed them, too. This process will help make sure any conclusions or statements made are sound. Therefore, I am afraid we are limited to what we can share here in the near future. Demographic information and other basic descriptive information about our participants can be shared here, certainly.
My co-researcher and I did put a lot of effort into designing this survey, and while there are limitations, thank you for the kind words.
(Stand by, Bluewildebeest. Will address your concern shortly)
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Telecaster68

JSLR - can you put up a link/summary/whatever to the final paper when it's peer-reviewed and published etc?

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JSLR - can you put up a link/summary/whatever to the final paper when it's peer-reviewed and published etc?

If we are fortunate enough to have these results published, sure. I think it is only right that participants, such on those on these forums, see the results of their contributions.

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CosineTheCat

For anyone that is interested, I do keep track of asexual research over in World Watch, once the paper is released it will be posted in there, not the actually paper itself but the information to find the paper. A lot of times papers aren't released to the public but you are able to purchase them for a small fee if you're really interested in viewing them. Or if you're part of a university, normally you're able to view them for free through your universities database. This is just my experience dealing and working with asexual research.

Possible when finished, you'll give us an abstract and a link to possible purchase a copy of the article, if it is published that is.

Also, from the director of social media standpoint, I posted information for this on AVEN's social media pages. I hope you get additional entries from those. :)

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Aceghost, your participation is appreciated as is your warning to others. I am sorry that our survey made you feel uncomfortable. Unfortunately, we thought that this might be a possibility when writing a survey that asks about relationship experiences, although we hoped it would not happen. Are you okay now?

Oh, thanks a lot for your concern! Yeah, I'm okay. My emotional reaction to the survey had a lot more to do with my shitty country western song of a life right now than it did the actual survey. ;) It's just the questions it asked evoked some barely plastered over, painful memories. It happens.

I mainly wanted to note it for others who might be going through something similar so they are able to gird themselves in advance.

Thanks for the additional detail on the publication procedure as well.

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I live right near BSU! Almost went there for college but I couldn't afford it. :(

It's nice to see you participating in asexual research! I hope we'll get to see the results eventually.

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Bluewildebeest

I couldn't finish the survey although I would have liked to, because I do not do "hierarchical polyamory". I do not have a primary partner. Please consider that not all polyamorous relationships are hierarchical - the survey acts on a wrong and clichéd assumption of what polyamory is.

(Stand by, Bluewildebeest. Will address your concern shortly)
Just wondering, if there's any news on the polyamory topic?
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I couldn't finish the survey although I would have liked to, because I do not do "hierarchical polyamory". I do not have a primary partner. Please consider that not all polyamorous relationships are hierarchical - the survey acts on a wrong and clichéd assumption of what polyamory is.

(Stand by, Bluewildebeest. Will address your concern shortly)
Just wondering, if there's any news on the polyamory topic?

Sorry for the delay!

We've received this complaint from many other participants. We had participants discuss their primary partner only because we wanted them to discuss only one partner. For the purposes of our understanding of the data, and reporting on the results, it's not being portrayed as a primary partner who is regarded as superior to the others. It's simply the one partner participants discussed. We could've just as easily asked for the longest partner, newest partner, youngest partner, etc. But we did learn our lesson that in cases where the partner distinction is arbitrary, use of the term "primary partner" is not the way to go, for the exact reasons you stated.

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Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for the clarification, and I'm sorry if my answering for two partners instead of just one screws with your statistics :(

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I too thought the survey was well done. Tho it seems you could have simply gathered more very useful information by collecting answers for each of several partners rather than just for a primary (or arbitrarily chosen) partner among others. In particular, for those reporting more than 1 partner I'd be curious how often the answers about each would be the same or very similar, or if perhaps you might detect that people are getting their different needs met through different partners, or if the differences between partners track to different gender identities. just a few thoughts.

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I too thought the survey was well done. Tho it seems you could have simply gathered more very useful information by collecting answers for each of several partners rather than just for a primary (or arbitrarily chosen) partner among others. In particular, for those reporting more than 1 partner I'd be curious how often the answers about each would be the same or very similar, or if perhaps you might detect that people are getting their different needs met through different partners, or if the differences between partners track to different gender identities. just a few thoughts.

That's actually a really good question. I personally have very different needs met with different partners, but I wonder how common that it, and to what extent...?

*wanders off to muse and wish I was a PhD in something related so I could do this research too*

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I too thought the survey was well done. Tho it seems you could have simply gathered more very useful information by collecting answers for each of several partners rather than just for a primary (or arbitrarily chosen) partner among others. In particular, for those reporting more than 1 partner I'd be curious how often the answers about each would be the same or very similar, or if perhaps you might detect that people are getting their different needs met through different partners, or if the differences between partners track to different gender identities. just a few thoughts.

There would certainly be value in collecting information about all partners or several. You are right that people can get different needs met from each partner and the relationships could be quite different. However, since this particular study is not focused on just polyamory specifically, we thought talking about only one partner should suffice. Having people fill out information about each partner would have not only extend the length of the survey potentially causing people to get burned out, but also complicate the data beyond the scope of this single study. In the future, we can be more specific in this regard.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for the clarification, and I'm sorry if my answering for two partners instead of just one screws with your statistics :(

You don't have to worry about that at all. We're at about 2,000 participants so each individual's answers are only a tiny tiny part of all the data.

I too thought the survey was well done. Tho it seems you could have simply gathered more very useful information by collecting answers for each of several partners rather than just for a primary (or arbitrarily chosen) partner among others. In particular, for those reporting more than 1 partner I'd be curious how often the answers about each would be the same or very similar, or if perhaps you might detect that people are getting their different needs met through different partners, or if the differences between partners track to different gender identities. just a few thoughts.

That's actually a really good question. I personally have very different needs met with different partners, but I wonder how common that it, and to what extent...?

*wanders off to muse and wish I was a PhD in something related so I could do this research too*

in our literature search to design this study we actually read a research article you might find interesting. Its titled Need Fulfillment in Polyamorous Relationships by Mitchell, Bartholomew, & Cobb http://members.psyc.sfu.ca/documents/doc/164

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**UPDATE** May 1st 2016


The survey is now closed. We had a huge response with 2,042 participants! So thank you so much to everyone who participated and everyone who provided feedback. All the comments we received were extremely helpful and we did our best to reply to each one.


Regarding the drawing, 1,050 participants entered their email addresses and 2 winners have been randomly chosen and notified (using https://www.random.org/).


Finally, many asked about the results. We will definitely return to update everyone as we start to get some preliminary findings so everyone can see what their data turns into. Our ultimate goal is to get our study published in a journal. This is an extremely lengthy process (months or even years), but should that finally happen, we would share that link also. Feel free to continue to comment, but we may not check this thread as often as usual while we are in the midst of analysis and such.



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