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AIS-12 Asexuality Identification Scale test


skepa

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1.5

2.2

3.5

4.4

5.5

6.4 to 5 Have asked a few people "why did you marry him?" or similar .

7.4

8.4 I'm mildly curious, and a virgin. Any question with the word again in I've ignored the again.

9.5 any sexual activity i engage in should be of my own free will.

10.3 

11.5 

12.5

Total 51

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1. 2

2. 4

3. 5

4. 5

5. 4

6. 4

7. 5

8. 3

9. 5

10. 5

11. 5

12. 5

13. Asexual to the layman, but Gray-A to the Ace community.

 

52/60

 

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Let's see

1. 4
2. 3
3. 3
4. 3
5. 4
6. 5
7. 2
8. 3
9. 3
10. 4
11. 4
12. 3
41/60 and i'm possibly demisexual

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ChickenPadSeeEew

Interesting. I answered as best as I could (some of those questions were hard).

 

I got 43, which puts me within the lower range of asexual types of experiences.

 

I don't ever experience sexual attraction or desire for sexual intimacy with other people, and never have, except for one person after decades together. So I class myself as demisexual or grey-sexual. It's a fine part of our relationship and I can even enjoy it, but... I don't need it. We could stop tomorrow and that would be fine.

 

The thought of sex with other people, if I really, actually think about it, can make me feel a bit ill. But it's not a strong repulsion in general (only when I imagine commencing sex acts with people. "NO" "Gross" "No way!" are thoughts that spring to mind. Even good-looking celebrities. I just don't have a sexual gaze... for anyone).

 

I otherwise class myself as sex indifferent, in general, but sex positive within my relationship, since it does seem to keep us ticking along pretty well (in addition to loads of emotional closeness.). I think our emotional closeness is the key for me. Without that, I'd never want to have sex, although I'm sure that's the case for lots of far-more sexual people, too! 

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  • 4 months later...

I'm not taking this because I'm pretty sure I've already taken it, or some other form of it, and I've also done a test that goes into detail what kind of "asexual" you are, autosexual? Etc. It was super weird, but even though I'm the type that likes these types of quizzes, I think....they can have an elitist tone and they're not completely accurate? I just feel really weird about them. But that's just my opinion, if these types of things are helpful to some folks then have at it!

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48/60   What does that make me?

 

Orientation : Asexual + ficto-homo-Broski mate style wtf ...

 

Questions #8 and #9 could  imply, that one may have had sexual experience. The 'again' would be read so.

If one has not had sexual experience and doesn't want it, the 'again' should be in brackets eh.

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 4/5/2018 at 12:10 PM, skepa said:

Hey everyone, just thought I'd post this up here as the main topic if people find it useful for understanding themselves better, and perhaps for a better understanding of which labels they would like to use for themselves :)

 

In answering these questions, keep in mind a definition of sex or sexual activity that may include intercourse/penetration, caressing, and/or foreplay

 

https://avia-viridis.neocities.org/acescale.html

 

The questionnaire was intended to provide a valid measure independent of whether the individual self-identified as asexual and was developed in several stages, including: development and administration of open-ended questions (209 participants: 139 asexual and 70 sexual); administration and analysis of resulting 111 items (917 participants: 165 asexual and 752 sexual); administration and analysis of 37 retained items (1,242 participants: 316 asexual and 926 sexual); and validity analysis of the final items. The resulting Asexuality Identification Scale (AIS), a 12-item questionnaire, is a brief, valid, and reliable self-report instrument for assessing asexuality. 

"A cut-off score of 40/60 has been proposed, such that those participants who score at or above 40 on the AIS are likely to experience a lack of sexual attraction. The final item (“Which of the following best describes you?”) is unscored."

 

I took the test and got a 39 -_- what the hell am I then!!?

 

 

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6 minutes ago, songchick said:

"A cut-off score of 40/60 has been proposed, such that those participants who score at or above 40 on the AIS are likely to experience a lack of sexual attraction. The final item (“Which of the following best describes you?”) is unscored."

 

I took the test and got a 39 -_- what the hell am I then!!?

 

 

Probably close enough to the proposed cutoff to be considered likely Asexual, if anything at or over is automatically.

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8 minutes ago, MichaelTannock said:

Probably close enough to the proposed cutoff to be considered likely Asexual, if anything at or over is automatically.

Yeah, makes sense.  

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Winged Whisperer

As someone still in my questioning phase who deep down feels like I probably am some sort of asexual, I took this and ended up with 43 and 44 (took it twice to be sure I'm getting my answers accurately), which is really close to that cut-off point and really doesn't reassure me one way or the other. However if I define the last question as meaning "the concept is impactful on your life" (because sex is ruining my life) then I'd go all the way down to 40 which is the exact cut-off point. But for the intent of research anyway, researchers would consider me ace.

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Not sure if anyone remembers this, but the AIS questions were asked verbatim in the 2017 Ace Community Survey (see here, page 33).  So eventually, we're going to get statistics on how people in the community score.

 

The questionnaire was developed with only a few hundred participants, and it's possible that these participants were not representative of the ace community--and certainly it wouldn't have included gray/demi people.  So I'm really interested to find out how many asexual people are miscategorized by the questionnaire, and also where gray/demi people end up.

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  • 1 month later...

I took it twice and I scored within 2 points 47on the first and 49 on the second, the first time I was confused by a couple questions. Did it include masturbation. No I would not go the rest of my life without masturbating. Not an option 😘.

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I scored 43 if you count masturbation as a sexual activity, 55 if you don't.

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  • 1 month later...
dragon_cake

1. 5

2. 2

3. 4

4. 2

5. 5

6. 4

7. 4

8. 4

9. 5

10. 4

11. 3

12. 3

 

Total: 46/60

 

I can only imagine masturbation, caressing, and foreplay in this test.

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everywhere and nowhere

Quoting myself for a reason...

On 5/6/2018 at 3:40 AM, Nowhere Girl said:

I'm pretty sure that the most commonly given number of asexuals - 1% - is quite seriously understated.

Just by the way: I realised that there is some connection between the AIS-12 test and the number of asexuals.

I have already linked this several times: How many asexuals are there? The author analyses several sources which give different data about the percentage of asexual or possibly asexual people. One of these sources is AIS-12. Here's the fragment of this text which deals with AIS-12; emphasis mine.

Quote

Because of the above, I’d like to explore options other than asking “are you asexual?” and scaling up.

One thing that seems to work well in sociology is asking about behavior, not self-identifiers. For instance, asking men if they are gay will get you one answer. Asking men if they sometimes have sex with other men gets a larger pool – perhaps they’re closeted, bisexual, used to identify as gay, or regularly have ‘bud sex’ with their guy pals but identify as straight. Self identification is hard, behavior is a little more straightforward.

Because asexuality is an umbrella term, asking about behavior is difficult. The Asexuality Identification Scale (AIS) seems to be our answer – researchers came up with a bunch of question about attitudes towards sex (EG: “My ideal relationship would not involve sexual activity, 0 (disagree strongly) – 5 (agree strongly)”), gave them to ace-identified participants from the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, and chose the most predictive ones. 93% of these subjects got a score above 40 on the resulting 12-item questionnaire (the questions are available here.)

This seems pretty good to me. People who hang around AVEN aren’t necessarily representative of the larger ace population, and they’re selected for knowing that they’re asexual, but it is a popular central message board for ace people, and acknowledges (and presumably contains) ace people of a variety of different stripes. So I feel reasonably comfortable saying that if respondents answer honestly, this scale will catch most (~90%) of the ace or potentially ace people.

(Answering the questions honestly is tricky, though. I suspect that many people who are asexual but haven’t realized it yet will lean towards the sexual end of the test scores, and won’t after realizing it. I suppose the way to test this is to ask an enormous number of people to take the test, then have them do it again five years later, and see if any of them have started identifying as asexual in the meantime.)

In coming up with the questions for this quiz, they compared the 176 asexual participants to 716 non-ace participants, recruited off of Craigslist / psychology research websites / their university study pool. Of those, 4% scored above 40.

This could be read as the false positive of the test. I would like to offer a counter proposal: This is closer to the baseline rate of asexuality in the general population. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like anybody else has given this survey to a large random sample group.

One reason this might not represent reality is because it seems possible that advertising for the study mentioned that it was a study on sexual behaviors, and I imagine a lot of people closer to the asexual end of the smorgasbord would say “nope, not really my area of expertise” and move on, leaving them under-represented in the quiz. Alternatively, maybe they’d think “well, I appear to have a different relationship with sex than other people I know, so I should take this survey”, and they’d be over-represented. I don’t know how the survey was presented.

 

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I did this test a while back when I thought I might be grey-a and at the time I didn’t find it too helpful. The link doesn’t work for me now but I’m pretty sure it’s the same test (going by the name). I completed it with my “then” understanding of sexual attraction and ended up somewhere in the grey area, ironically. Once I understood myself better I did the test again with a slightly different interpretation of some of the questions and I was well within asexual. No particular feelings either way, just thought I’d share.

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  • 4 weeks later...
a_subtle_reality

Hmmm. I get a 'low' score on the questions as stated (high 20s to high 30s depending on how broadly the questions are interpreted). If I substitute cake for sex, I get basically the same scores (and intensity of feeling about the questions / scenarios - and no, I don't get cake cravings or anything like that), except for question 6, where I really would be more confused by people spending the amount of time and effort on cake that many people do on relationships with another person.

 

Does that mean that I "like like" cake?

 

Honestly this question set seems to be a bit absurd in the case of someone who's sex-favourable, and may confuse the issue more than help, for someone who's questioning.

 

It would clearly pick up people in the sex-neutral through sex-adverse range just fine though. By my count, there are 8 questions that relate to the sex-favourable vs sex-neutral vs sex-adverse dimension, 2 that relate to asexuality, and 2 which don't have a clear purpose but seem to be drawn from common anecdotes from asexuals. Given that people who are neutral or adverse are probably much more likely to be asexual than allosexual, and allosexuals seem much more likely to be sex-favourable than neutral or adverse, it's not surprising they found a good correlation, but that doesn't mean they're actually measuring the variable they're claiming to measure. 

 

I imagine the wording of some of those questions would make a lot more sense to someone who interprets some of the words differently in the context of sex vs. dessert, though...

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  • 3 months later...
not_all_who_wander

@skepa This link doesn't seem to work for me. Can I find it anywhere else? I am interested in trying it.

 

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NickyTannock
not_all_who_wander

I got a 35. I always take these tests hoping they will somehow help me, but they never really do.

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everywhere and nowhere
On 8/29/2019 at 9:10 PM, not_all_who_wander said:

@skepa This link doesn't seem to work for me. Can I find it anywhere else? I am interested in trying it.

 

Maybe an original English version should be permanently pinned on our forum? People need it, and it's anyway not an automated text which counts your score, but one in which you have to add the numbers for every question yourself.

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On 4/7/2018 at 6:01 PM, Nowhere Girl said:

I think that a better "asexuality test" would be one less obvious, kinda hidden among other questions. But this approach could also have its drawbacks. For example, sex-repulsed aces are likely to get the highest scores in this particular test, and some of them could be too uncomfortable with a test for general attitudes about sex and sexuality. Another problem is that it's not so easy to design a sexuality test which would work "seamlessly" both for sexually experienced and sexually inexperienced people. In case of this scale it was just a little annoying omission which could be fixed by writing "(again)" instead of "again", but in large tests it's much more difficult. Actually, one of my first posts on this forum was about measures of sexual orientation and how lots of these questionnaires are simply impossible to answer for a person who has never had sex, as if the authors assumed either that every adult has sex, period, or that a sexually inexperienced person is a tabula rasa and literally has no orientation, so there's no point in testing it...

Yeah, I totally agree. If I had taken this test before I'd ever had sex, I would have answered all the questions differently because I had an expectation built in my mind about how I would feel about sex before I'd ever had it. Now, I feel differently, and when I took this test, with my current feelings toward sex and sexual attraction in mind, I got a 52/60. The questions do kinda lead you, though, and I'm a pretty sex neutral ace, all things considered. 

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everywhere and nowhere
11 hours ago, skepa said:

The best place to find the test and why the questions were chosen are on the original research paper. The test can be found at the very bottom:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7c8a/4bb76bcd16d328419afd6eca26d4a79fabe9.pdf

In fact, thanks for posting it. While I have seen this paper before, I haven't read it carefully, and there's an interesting passage near the end of the text:

Quote

There is a possibility that some participants in this study who identified as “sexual” actually lack sexual attraction, and would thus be better categorized as “asexual” in research. Given the relative recency with which the term asexuality has been available, it may be that an asexual is misclassifying him/herself as sexual despite having a high AIS score. (...) In fact, as can be seen in Figure 1, there is a subgroup of sexual participants in this study (4%) who received a score greater than 40 on the AIS, and approximately 1% who scored above 50. While this is a limitation of our study, it could be argued that this confirms that the AIS is functioning as it was designed and is identifying those participants who might be better classified as asexual instead of sexual.

It partially contradicts something written in an analysis which I have quoted several times, "How many asexuals are there?":

Quote

In coming up with the questions for this quiz, they compared the 176 asexual participants to 716 non-ace participants, recruited off of Craigslist / psychology research websites / their university study pool. Of those, 4% scored above 40.

This could be read as the false positive of the test. I would like to offer a counter proposal: This is closer to the baseline rate of asexuality in the general population. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like anybody else has given this survey to a large random sample group.

It seems that at least the people who developed the AIS-12 themselves admit exactly the same possibility. While they don't seem to openly question the supposed 1% prevalence of asexuality, they give premises which might lead exactly to this conclusion: that this value is an understatement.

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