Surveys to Take This Week

Surveys for Saturday, February 29

This is a new thing I’m trying out to improve the quality and sample size of my surveys. Every Saturday, I’ll send this email to my subscribers with the current open surveys. All of them are anonymous and will be used for future articles (sometimes one might not be used, but only if there’s a bad sample size or the data doesn’t say anything interesting.) Most of the articles about the surveys will have some degree of a paywall, but it will vary. Occasionally I will make one free after a little while. Become a paid subscriber to get full access to all survey results!

If you want to read the types of articles for which my surveys are used, see the following:

• The Sexual Habits of Highly Successful Men

• Dressing for the Male Gaze, Female Gaze, and Gazes In Between

• Sex Robots will Replace Some Things

Current Available Surveys

• General sex/dating history: Open to all Americans over the age of 18. There are some sensitive questions, so let me reiterate that this and all of my surveys are 100% anonymous.

• OCD and intrusive thoughts: Open to anyone who has OCD. Very short survey, but there is a longer-form section to elaborate on how OCD intrusive thoughts affect you, which could be quoted anonymously in an article.

• Parenting across cultures: Open to parents who live outside the US, and have parented in countries outside the US. Also open to American expats, as long as they refer to their parenting experiences outside the US. This is an open-ended survey which mostly asks you to write your own answers- ideal if you have a little extra time.

• Singles survey about marriage: This one focuses on the differences between marriage/kids timeline between men and women who date each other, so it’s open to either heterosexual people or bisexual/pansexual people who enter “opposite sex” relationships at least 50% of the time. You also need to be American and never married. You do not need to want to get married to qualify.

• Reddit relationship advice survey: This one is open to all people who have ever asked Reddit for relationship advice, including non-romantic relationships.

A note about inclusivity and demographics

Every time I release a survey, I usually get feedback that I’ve “excluded” certain demographics. I wanted to address this here so nobody was confused about my intention. There are several reasons I might release a survey that excludes particular groups:

• That simply isn’t the group I’m studying. If I’m studying parents, I’m not going to include non-parents in the survey. If I’m studying singles, I’m not going to include married people. Most of the time, when I write about relationships, I focus on heterosexual monogamous ones because that’s kind of my wheelhouse. That doesn’t mean that all my sex/dating surveys will be for hetero monogamous people but most will probably lean in that direction.

  • When it comes to trans people, I typically just assume they will select their gender (ie: trans men select “man” as gender.) I don’t plan on doing any studies that report on differences between trans and cis people.

• Sample size concerns. Because I’m lucky to get 1,000 responses to a survey (a bigger sample size would be more reliable) I don’t want to segment groups too much if it means an unreliable sample size for that group. Even when I want to study the general population, it sometimes doesn’t make sense for me to ask people to specify their gender beyond man/woman/nonbinary because we’re looking at gender identities that would be too small for a reliable sample size (I tend not to even get enough nonbinary responses to be accurate.) When I report on sexual orientations, I typically have to keep it to straight/gay/bi, just because any orientation less common than those three is unlikely to have enough respondents to make sense for reporting. Same with things like religion or political affiliation. It doesn’t mean I want to ostracize any group, but if I don’t think I’ll have enough responses to be reliable, I may have to group different cohorts together, which is also not ideal.

Thanks everyone!!!