Same, different, it’s still sex
Stuff has a story about another sex survey, with the lead
It appears almost a given that men’s sexual fantasies will differ from those of women and now there’s a survey to prove it.
The link is to the Huffington Post. There’s another link further down the story to the Armenian Medical Network, which, to be fair, is running almost exactly the original press release, including the typos (the respondents are described as 49.6% mend and 0.4% women).
So what was this survey? It appears to have been a serious attempt to find stuff out, conducted by psychology researcher at the University of Granada. It hasn’t been published, which is a bad sign and makes it hard to get details, but the press release implies that it has been accepted for publication.
The survey was conducted by questionnaire, and “A number of provincial ongoing training centers, adult education centers, Granada local library and several University of Granada and Universidad Complutense schools collaborated in this study”. That suggests it wasn’t a random sample. The extremely equal representation of men and women suggests perhaps a quota sample — interviewers choosing people to ask, from a set of categories. That’s not ideal, but it’s better than just putting a link out on the internet, as was done by the last sex survey we examined, and as the Spanish researchers are doing for their next study according to the press release.
Anyway, what really attracted my attention when I saw the press release was the title:
A study shows that men and women have the same sexual fantasies
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »