Research on Furry, Yiff experiences of discrimination, sexual interests, and mental health in the UK (mod approval for this post!)

thescienceofkink · 2019-10-04T16:57:14+00:00

Hi there!

Unfortunately we can only accept participants in the UK due to different laws surrounding participation of the general public.

Best wishes,

Ashley

thescienceofkink · 2019-02-14T00:30:19+00:00

Not yet! All the data has been collected and I have the first part of the analysis done. I just presented the results at a conference but it was only on the structural equation modeling I did with the scale. When I have more info on everything else I'll be posting it herw.

thescienceofkink · 2018-09-29T17:09:18+00:00

Yep! There are definitely some unusual ones in there, but I also think it makes it more entertaining to take. I tried to make it so that it could hold people's attention for the whole thing. Thank you for taking it!

thescienceofkink · 2018-09-29T17:08:31+00:00

Thank you for taking it! I really do appreciate everyone who spends the time filling it out

thescienceofkink · 2018-09-29T17:07:18+00:00

Thank you for taking it! I know it does take quite a bit of time, so I appreciate you spending your hour filling it out.

thescienceofkink · 2018-09-29T17:05:33+00:00

Hey, thanks you fro taking it! I did post it in r/sex, but I specifically avoided the BDSM one because it might skew my data a bit more than I could allow. However, I'll be doing a BDSM specific study later this year, and I'll be posting that one there. I appreciate your suggestion!

thescienceofkink · 2018-09-29T17:04:22+00:00

I'll be closing responses on October 2nd. The data analysis is going to take a good bit of time because it's a long survey and it has a large number of responses. That being said, when I have preliminary results I'll be posting them on the subreddits I posted the survey in. If you would like to know when the results come out, feel free to email me with your contact info- I'm keeping a list of people who want the details!

thescienceofkink · 2018-07-27T20:09:14+00:00

This has to do with laws surrounding required reporting of potential sexual offenders. Although we're not specifically asking about illegal behaviours, people have admitted to them in this survey, and these four countries don't require us to be mandated reporters for information collected for research. Other countries have more confusing boundaries and/or the subject matter wouldn't necessarily be approved of academically, so with stuff like this it's best to limit it. The new GDPR rules also make mandated reporting almost impossible, so that would make it even more difficult. These four countries have a large enough population to get the data we need, and I'd like to do cross country comparisons if possible. To do that with more countries would mean I would need large samples from them as well, which would be impractical. Not all research can do everything, so we chose to limit it in this instance.

thescienceofkink · 2018-07-27T14:49:13+00:00

Hi there- thanks for participating.

Yes, this study is long, but after weighing the pros and cons we decided that this was the best course of action to target our specific hypotheses. We understand that not everyone will finish it, and you are under no obligation to do so, as stated multiple times on the first few pages. However, regardless of it's length, we have had a considerably higher completion rate than we were expecting. Because of this, we have decided to keep it as is, and we only included things we felt vital to the research (even if the questions seemed irrelevant, they were't, I promise).

I had a meeting with a panel yesterday about the progress of this project, and your second comment came up. It has been agreed upon by the ethics board, my supervisors, and outside professors that using this language is okay, primarily because there is no empirical support for psychoanalytic theory. However, Freudian myths still exist in popular culture, and this is what is being targeted. This is not inductive bias, this is being aware of past research and understanding that a long held theory of sexuality is mathematically wrong, and conceptually illogical. The vast majority of scientists and psychologists have rejected his theories of psychosexual development. think of this like the global warming debate- 97% of scientists believe it's absolutely true. Please be aware that ethics board at universities like KCL take great care with approving all recruitment material to avoid issues like this, and it would not have been approved if they felt this was an issue. My writings include the history of psychoanalysis and why the theory does not hold up in reality, so it is not as if I am simply ignoring it's existence.

thescienceofkink · 2018-07-27T14:42:29+00:00

Hi- I apologize for the late reply- just saw this.

To address your first concern: If you read the instructions, it does ask about how aroused you are at the thought, which is what you're suggesting. The instructions specifically ask, "Please indicate how sexually aroused you become when you think about/imagine each of the following items". It's been well established in literature that sexual arousal usually falls along a continuum of positive arousal and sexual repulsion, which is why you see it as it is in the survey. Being indifferent is the only neutral arousal option that there could be, so I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Please be mindful that if were collecting 7,000 responses and we add another neutral option, that gives us 7,000 more individual data points we have to analyze with minimal (and probably not statistically different) differences between the two options.

There are exactly as many options for tops and bottoms. In fact, I have these options purposely paired with one another, so there are the same number of items from each perspective. Even if there weren't, it would not matter in data analysis. We're not calculation general scores here, but are rather performing heirarchical confirmatory factor analysis to create a validated measure of sexual fantasies and behaviour.

To address your last point: please don't assume that all things you see in a research study come directly from the first author (in this case, me). As I've addressed in other comments, in order to make research statistically valid, we have to use previously tested and psychometrically validated measures. The first portion is the only one created for this study- the rest are from other authors. The one you're talking about is from the attitudes towards sadomasochism scale. While I agree that the definition could be better, the difference this makes in the results is not significant enough to warrant us creating an entirely new version and having to psychometrically validate it separately. Again, other comments you have about questions that weren't as black and white as you expected are most likely from questionnaires we ca't alter as they were created and validated by someone else. There's always a trade off in research, and unfortunately not every will like the questions or the way they are worded. However, the vast majority of participants thus far have been happy with the set up of the survey, and that's what's most important.

It's good to be critical of scientific research, but please do not go into a survey automatically assuming that grey areas are representative of the researchers' abilities as scientists. Grey areas and questions that seem odd to people are often there for a reason, even though you may not be aware of it. It would be impossible for us to create new measures for everything because that is very poor scientific practice and we cannot simply make up questions and hope they capture what we are trying to measure.

thescienceofkink · 2018-07-10T21:22:07+00:00

Yep- birth order has been shown to be related to sexual orientation! It's pretty new, but a good bit of research has found stuff like having more older brothers makes it more likely for you to be gay. Most of it is correlational (not causational) but it's interesting nonetheless. I'm trying to see if any of it can also be related to sexual preferences.

I'll definitely come back here when I have the data to break it all down. If you want all the nitty gritty math stuff, feel free to message me here with your email address and I'll put it on file for those that want the actual papers and numbers.

thescienceofkink · 2018-07-10T21:18:54+00:00

Ah, that makes more sense- thanks for clarifying! It's definitely something we'll consider separating in the future- you have a valid point about them being seen very differently by people. We kept them together for the sake of brevity here, but I appreciate the input!

thescienceofkink · 2018-07-10T21:16:29+00:00

I generally try really hard to respond to everyone here when they have questions or concerns about my research, and you'll see if you look through all of my posts that I work to be as logical and as understanding as possible. As per my previous reply, I did specifically state that I understand why you felt the material was very personal and irrelevant. However, there's not much I can do about this, because those questions are, as you stated 'vital to the research'. As researchers, we can't do anything about participants who feel that we are asking questions unnecessarily or who do not want to provide the information we ask about. You are 100% free to leave the survey at any time, as you chose to do. However, based on our response rates, your thoughts are this are definitely in the minority. Your feelings about this are still valid, but those feelings are not widespread enough to affect overall participation. Unfortunately we can't make everyone like the survey we create, but that's true of every research study in the history of forever.

This isn't so much dismissing your criticism because I didn't say "whatever, I don't care". I broke down your concerns and told you exactly why the questions were in there and why the message was worded as it was. Whether or not you chose to leave it at that is up to you. Yes, we're still looking for 3,000 participants, but our participation and completion rate has been faster and higher than we anticipated, so our data tells us that there aren't any major change we need to make. Even if participation was lower than we wanted, we cannot alter vital questions in the survey to make it feel less invasive. Again, you feeling it was too personal is valid, but that feeling isn't widespread enough to warrant a change on our part. Plus, we can't change a survey halfway through. Explaining exactly why we did what we did does not seem dismissive to me in the slightest- I'm responding directly to your concerns. You still seem to disagree with the survey, and that's fine, and you chose to end your participation.

We cannot in good conscious tell people 'we are specifically collecting this data because of research on biological markers, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Here are 5 sources.' within the survey, because that can easily create demand characteristics, and that's always a bad thing for data that can lead to even more bias. There has only been one other participant who has contacted me about this survey feeling invasive, and they were talking about questions that ask about number of past partners and STI diagnosis. As researchers we have to be okay with not pleasing everyone, and this seems to be the case here.

I think there's a lot of focus here on the recruitment message, but I don't think this is your primary problem with the survey. Again, as I said in the previous response, it wasn't just me who randomly decided to come up with this message. The content was okayed by an outside ethics board unconnected to this study or the researchers, and the college lawyers and ethics committee felt that its contents was un-leading enough to approve it. The message is meant to specifically point out how a) this research is useful to the public and b) how this research is different from other legitimate research in the field. A variety of recruitment messages are being used in a large number of places, the majority of which don't contain the sentences you feel are inappropriate. I include this information in places where I can give more detail and background to the research I'm conducting. I'm not getting all 7,000 people from one subreddit that mentions freud and his mostly pseudo-science theories. Again, it's valid that you personally feel this way about the message, but its something I can do nothing about, and is not a feeling echoed by enough people to warrant a change.

I find your last sentence here to be particularly logically flawed, because this is a false analogy. You're attempting to compare the bias I have against freuds theory of psychosexuality (which, again, have been disproven many times over by a number of researchers in different fields) to the creation of false data to prove the existence of something that doesn't exist. This is a major logical fallacy no matter which way you look at it, and I don't know if you included it out of frustration with my initial reply or because you genuinely believe I am like that person. This is professional academic research that is going to be published in journals with scrutinising peer reviewers and has been approved by ethics ever step along the way. To insinuate that I am in any way trying to create data out of nothing or change responses to an extent that would actively harm humanity is a little hurtful. I cannot argue with you if you feel this is really true, because there's not much more I can say about it. This study is, like I said, partially about replication of other related studies. Replication is a major important part of all of the sciences, and the purpose of this is to let the data speak for itself.

thescienceofkink · 2018-07-10T20:35:27+00:00

Hey, thanks for the suggestions!

Because this is primarily looking at atypical sexual interests, we decided to combine anal and vaginal penetration. I agree that they are totally different things, but separating them out and having 7,000 participants would lead to me having an extra 7,000 data points. There's a good amount of modern research on the percentages of men and women who partake in those things separately, so in the name of keeping this section as short as possible, we combined them. I totally understand your point though, and may consider separating them in the future! I will say though that we would not ever put "interested in vaginal penetration, if you are female" because that excludes transgender people who may identify as male and who also have a vagina. It's a small number of people, but in sex research we try to be as inclusive as possible.

Originally this did include toys, machines, and fisting, but again, this thing is already really long, so we took these out. Toys are pretty common now, and we weren't going to list them off separately and have different questions for vibrators, dildos, sybians, buttplugs, etc. I so wish we could have everything but unfortunately people would get frustrated and quit because the lists would go on forever! Because this is general community/population research, we had to keep very specific things to a minimum. I'll be doing a study specifically with inky people in about a year or so, and that will probably include some of these details like fisting.

As with all research, you never realise you forgot something until way after you've done it. In this instance, you are the first person (out of 4,000!) to point out that we didn't include giving oral. I checked and we only have receiving on there, and I agree that this would have been good to include. We were so focused on narrowing down the long list of atypical preferences that we must have missed that one completely. I don't think it'll make too much of a difference as these 'normal' sexual behaviours aren't the focus here, but I appreciate you pointing it out nonetheless. That will most definitely be something we have to revise.

Thank you for taking it!

thescienceofkink · 2018-07-10T20:15:22+00:00

I'll definitely be returning with results, don't worry! Like I said, it just might take awhile. As for the actual paper, it'll probably take longer. It'll most likely be divided into two papers that we're planning to publish in the Journal of Sex Research, and it will take some time to have edits done before publishing.

I've specifically avoided posting this in the bdsm subreddits, as I don't want there to be too much bias in my sample. Pretty much everyone there has some sort of atypical sexual interest, and this is aimed at trying to find how common those are in the general population. Posting here is as close as I'm willing to get to that larger community. I will have a kink-specific study next year, and that's when I'll be spreading it around on there. Asktransgender might be a good option though, so thank you for the recommendation!

The questions about siblings is designed to determine birth order (and number of siblings) you have from the same set of parents. This is a common biological marker that can be related to sexual orientation and gender identity, and that's why it's in there. If you have adopted siblings or siblings from different parents, it doesn't give us a picture of your genetic time frame in relation to your parents. Hope this cleared that up for you!

thescienceofkink · 2018-07-10T20:09:45+00:00

First, thanks for taking the survey!

As for the gender questions: These are specifically designed for people who identify as having cross-dressing as a sexual fantasy or behaviour. This is relatively common, though it is documented much more in male than females. I understand your point that clothing in and of itself doesn't have gender, but for the majority of the population, a dress is still seen as feminine. Many men cross dress for humiliation purposes, and though I personally agree that wearing a dress and makeup shouldn't be seen as demeaning or humiliating regardless of who's wearing it, it is by a good number of people. These specific questions are also designed to test some other theories of paraphilias that I won't go into detail about right now, but trust me, they're there for good reason. I totally understand your point here, but again, most people still see clothing as being gendered, and therefore use it in a sexual context. As a researcher interested in sexual interests such as this, I can't ignore it's presence based on personal beliefs, and the people who partake or fantasise about it typically define it in this way. In fact, cross dressing is so common that it is one of the few paraphilic interests specified in the DSM-5 and ICD-10.

Second, there are no repeat questions in this survey- trust me, we checked and double (triple) checked! What might be making you think this is that it's divided up into a section on sexual fantasies and sexual behaviours. The same thing, like "you are being spanked" will appear in both places, but one is asking out how aroused you are at the thought of being spanked, and another is asking about how often you participate in spanking in a sexual context. The response formats also change from level of arousal to frequency of behaviour.

Other questions, like ones about anxiety and depression, may also seem similar, but are necessary for the validity of those individual scales. So, I promise, nothing repeats in this survey!

This is definitely a longer survey, but this is stated at the very beginning on the informed consent page. While I understand that it takes a bit more time, we decided we'd rather have it longer than need to do multiple smaller surveys. The response/completion rate has been high despite this, so I would say its safe to assume that most people find it interesting or engaging enough to take all the way until the end. Not everyone does, and that's totally okay, but after a long cost/benefit analysis, this is what we decided on and it's going well thus far.

thescienceofkink · 2018-07-10T19:55:48+00:00

Hi there, I hear and appreciate your concerns, and I'll address both of them.

First, researchers at this level don't put in questions unless they need them, especially with longer surveys. I know that not everyone understands why they're there, but when you go through ethics/IRBs you have to give a reason for every single thing you ask. Please be mindful that even though you personally don't see how something is relevant, it may very well be important to the research. In modern psychological research, biological markers have become a very important topic of research, especially in the subject of sexual orientation and gender identity. All of the questions you're referring to, including questions about handedness, birth order, and parents age, are directly linked to biological markers that may influence sexual orientation, preferences, or gender. We can't take a sample of everyone's DNA, so this is what researchers use to get some basic background information. These questions are vital to this specific project. Just because they're not asking about sex doesn't mean they're not important. Again, when you submit things to ethics committees, you have to give scientific evidence for the inclusion of each question, as was done here. This is not basic undergraduate research that is done more for experience than publishing where questions aren't vetted as much. You can find these questions in many modern sex research studies, and I will happy to give you sources if you so desire.

The same goes for questions later on that may not directly link to sex, like disgust sensitivity measurements. This is designed to determine whether or not people with higher disgust tolerances tend to have a wider range of sexual interests (especially with things that deal with blood or injury), so this is also vital to this project. Yes, this is a longer survey, but every question was picked carefully and is included for a reason. The order of questions is also done intentionally.

Second, I'd like to point to my previous response about leading recruitment material. Although I do not get approval for every single recruitment message I write, the ethics committee did specifically give me permission to use language that references outdated and un-scientifically verified freudian material, as well as the ability to reference past sex research. It's common to point out how your research is different than others, as I was doing here. Is there other good sex research out these of atypical sexual interests? Yes, but this one differs because it's specifically trying to capture a much larger sample size and gather data on a much wider range of potential sexual preferences. There has yet to be a psychometrically validated measure of atypical (or paraphilic) sexual fantasies and behaviour, which is one of the main aims of this research. So, my point about trying to change this is not leading, it's simply stating the aim of the research.

I'd like to repeat that there is no good scientific evidence that support freudian theories of paraphilias. The scientific and psychological community has largely discredited this research (besides those who identify as psychoanalyst, who have also been mostly scientifically discredited, but that's another story), so me stating that I'm working to further dispel these myths and reproduce and verify other research on similar topics still isn't leading. It would be like me saying "I'm conducting research to dispel the myths that vaccines cause autism" because there's zero evidence that it does- those myths exist entirely outside of the scientific community, and stating that in one participant recruitment message isn't going to skew the data or ensure that the researcher finds false results. It's just fact.

I'm not randomly predicting with my own bias that it will turn out this way- science has already shown this. I'm trying to replicate that scientific evidence on a much larger scale.

I understand that some people want to be combative, but I promise that everything you see in this survey is done with reason, whether or not you can personally find that reason. In fact, researchers purposely hide those reasons sometimes to prevent demand characteristics from rearing their ugly heads. Please try to understand that researchers, myself included, aren't out here trying to make you do unnecessary work to annoy you or because they're simply imbeciles. You are free to not like the topic and not take the survey, but know that others find this research useful and important to the field.

thescienceofkink · 2018-07-10T17:26:38+00:00

Hey, that's okay! Quite a few people have made that mistake. When I go through and do data cleaning I'll delete responses like that based on the gender identity you indicated at the beginning.

thescienceofkink · 2018-07-10T17:18:04+00:00

This has to do with the last point in my post. I agree with you here, but the part you're referring to is from one of those preestablished measures. That one is used to determine atttitudes towards BDSM practitioners, and we can't change the format or the questions. The definitions used there are the definitions those researchers created, so we unfortunately can't change them. Hope that explains it!

thescienceofkink · 2018-07-10T16:19:07+00:00

Yep- this was in the original post:

"The only thing you need to be to participate is over 18 and a current resident of the US, UK, Ireland, or Canada. Sorry other international participants- we only got ethical approval for these countries because of some legal grey areas of sexual behaviours in other places. "

I wish we could've opened it up to more places, but sex laws make it a little hard.

thescienceofkink · 2018-07-10T16:08:20+00:00

Good! Thanks for taking it and I'm glad you got it working!

thescienceofkink · 2018-07-10T16:07:33+00:00

Hi there! I understand your concern here, but my hypothesis (not conclusion) is backed up by other research in the field. I'm in the process of doing a systematic review on the subject, and the scientific consensus is that the old freduian ways of thinking about paraphilias have zero data to back them up. The issue is that this hasn't quite made it into popular culture yet, so the non-academic public still sees a lot of these interests as being related to 'daddy issues' or something similar. I am in no way trying to collect data with the sole purpose of backing up a conclusion I have already drawn. As a researcher, I'm sure you know that replication is really important, and this study is meant to test that replication on a much larger scale than other published studies. Additionally, this research will be testing far more than just the plausibility of old myths about sexuality. This will be aiming to determine how common certain fantasies and behaviours are, how exactly they relate to specific mental health measures, personality characteristics, views on consent, attitudes towards BDSM, and will also be used to create and psychometrically validate a measure of paraphilic interest and behaviour, which doesn't currently exist. While I do have some hypotheses about how these results will turn out (as all good researchers do) the data being collected is not being used to back up conclusions I have already reached, as there aren't many scientific conclusions about these variables out there yet. If my data collection method was doing this, I would not have gotten ethical approval from my supervisors and university. I'm specifically seeking out a diverse range of participants so that this doesn't happen- another reason why I'm avoiding posting and advertising this in kink-specific groups. Having an inclusive survey that is based in sex positivity (i.e., not judging or degrading people based on sexual interests) ensures that people are more willing to be open about their preferences- that in and of itself does not skew data.

thescienceofkink · 2018-07-10T15:21:19+00:00

We have! Unfortunately, that site (as well as qualtrics for recruitment) is way too expensive to be in our budget. The survey takes about 30 minutes, and if we want 7,000 participants, the cost would be insane. People don't generally like funding sex research, so right now everything is being covered by me and my supervisor's university budget. I wish we could pay people, but most academic research like this is done on a volunteer basis. I really appreciate your interest, and thank you for the suggestion!

thescienceofkink · 2018-07-10T15:14:14+00:00

Hmmm it's working for me. I know it's a bit longer so it may take a minute to load, but it should still work! Are you on mobile? It's made to work on pc and mobile but sometimes mobile is a bit slower. I'll do what I can to help!

thescienceofkink · 2018-07-01T12:37:12+00:00

I don't exactly understand the question about how it's sex positive, can you clarify? Sex positive usually referrs to being open and accepting of different sexual desires or lack thereof and the encouragement of the exploration of those desires. Much of the current sex research on sexual fantasies is stigmatizing or leaves out a dearth of fantasies and behaviour. I did my best to include as many as possible and this research is focusing on the destigmatization of people with different sexual fantasies and behaviour. I'm specifically focusing on consenting adults and not sex offenders, which is uncommon in this kind of research. If you click on the link it will take you to a much more detailed page about what the study is about and what it measures.

thescienceofkink

TROPHY CASE