The majority of females don’t identify as heterosexual?
That’s not quite right because some responses were coded as “unclear”: around 33% of female responses were coded as not heterosexual, which is almost 3x as many for male respondents.
Both those percentages are still relatively high, of course. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s clear what to make of them, due to a number of factors: i) results for the general population surveys are inconsistent across different surveys, ii) results seem to vary a lot by age (for example, see here) and likely by other demographic factors (e.g. how liberal or educated the population is) which I would expect to raise EA numbers, iii) most surveys don’t use the question format that we were asked to use (people writing in an unguided self-description) making comparison difficult, iv) as a result of that survey choice the results for our survey are very hard to interpret with large percentages of responses being explicitly coded as unclassifiable.
As such, while interesting, I think these results are hard to make anything of with any degree of confidence, which is why we haven’t looked into them in any detail.
Thanks. Any particular reason why you decided to do unguided self-description?
You could include the regular options and an “other (please specify)” option too. That might give people choice, reduce time required for analysis, and make comparisons to general population surveys easier.
This was a specific question and question format that it was requested we include. I wouldn’t like to speculate about the rationale, but I discuss some of the pros and cons associated with each style of question in general here.
That’s not quite right because some responses were coded as “unclear”: around 33% of female responses were coded as not heterosexual, which is almost 3x as many for male respondents.
Both those percentages are still relatively high, of course. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s clear what to make of them, due to a number of factors: i) results for the general population surveys are inconsistent across different surveys, ii) results seem to vary a lot by age (for example, see here) and likely by other demographic factors (e.g. how liberal or educated the population is) which I would expect to raise EA numbers, iii) most surveys don’t use the question format that we were asked to use (people writing in an unguided self-description) making comparison difficult, iv) as a result of that survey choice the results for our survey are very hard to interpret with large percentages of responses being explicitly coded as unclassifiable.
As such, while interesting, I think these results are hard to make anything of with any degree of confidence, which is why we haven’t looked into them in any detail.
Thanks. Any particular reason why you decided to do unguided self-description?
You could include the regular options and an “other (please specify)” option too. That might give people choice, reduce time required for analysis, and make comparisons to general population surveys easier.
This was a specific question and question format that it was requested we include. I wouldn’t like to speculate about the rationale, but I discuss some of the pros and cons associated with each style of question in general here.
I was surprised to see that this Gallup poll found no difference between college graduates and college nongraduates (in the US).