Sex Surveys: What’s the Point of Asking a Question When the Answer is Meaningless?

In a recent media sex poll undertaken by The Guardian they asked respondents the question:

“Have you ever had sex with someone with a physical disability?”

When I first read this I thought to myself, how ridiculous. If they don’t define disability we have no way of knowing what people were thinking about when answering the question. Did they only think about people using wheelchairs? What about people with diabetes, or epilepsy, or people who are Deaf, or visually impaired? What about someone who is temporarily disabled? I know we all love numbers and statistics. But if our goal is to actually understand something about human experience and not simply produce statistics to make ourselves feel better (or, more cynically, to create content that will sell newspapers) then we need to ask questions in such a way that the answers have some meaning.

I was also annoyed by the singling out of disability. On the one hand I could say it’s great that they’re putting disability into any conversation about sex. On the other, the question itself calls out people with disabilities as being sexually different. It occurred to me to write in and ask why they chose to ask about disability as opposed to other ways we categorize people. Why didn’t they ask about race, or class? It turns out they did (at least the race question). Here’s what they asked, and the responses (before reading, remember, this is a media survey, it isn’t scientifically rigorous and as I’ll argue below, it is pretty much useless as a data set).

Have you ever had sex with someone with a physical disability?
4%: Yes
26%: No, but I would not rule it out
70%: No, and I don't think I would

Have you ever had sex with someone of a different colour to you?
28%: Yes
72%: No

Would you ever consider having sex with someone of a different colour to you?
57%: Yes
43%: No

There’s a really good discussion going on in the comments section of Ouch!, BBCs disability magazine about the disability stats. I haven’t read any commentary about the race question but would be very interested to hear what people who know more about race than I do have to say about it, and the way the question was asked.

Petra Boynton, writing on her blog about these kinds of surveys offers a much more careful deconstruction of what’s wrong with them, and ends her post with the most logical argument of all for media outlets who pay a lot of money for this stuff:

If The Observer, or any other paper, is interested in knowing how to set up a reliable and accurate sex survey they could use that would truly give a picture of our sex lives…it really isn’t all that difficult – and since you’re going to keep on doing sex surveys and spending loads of cash on them you might as well ensure the survey is at least something that’s useful while you’re at it.

Ouch! : Sex and Statistics (via Lawrence Carter-Long)

The Guardian: Sex uncovered poll: Education and ethnicity