The 2014 AceCommunity Census was far from the first asexual community survey to be conducted. Asexual community surveys have been conducted at least as far back as 2008. Here we present a brief history lesson on various surveys, and what we learned from them. If you’re just interested in the results, see the end of the post. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: November 2014
Cross-orientations among non-aces
Question: Are non-asexual respondents identifying with mismatching sexual and romantic orientation labels?
The asexual community has long recognized the possibility of any combination of romantic and sexual orientations, such as heteroromantic asexual or biromantic homosexual. And in recent years, there’s been a push for the aromantic spectrum to be recognized independently from the asexual spectrum. We’d like to estimate the number of non-aces who have applied these ideas to themselves. Continue reading
Moving Forward: What analysis would YOU like to see?
Now that the first phase of data analysis for the 2014 Survey has been completed (the preliminary report for Asexual Awareness Week), it’s time to move on to the next phase, which consists of beginning to take a look at specific topics and variable interactions at a more detailed level. We’ll be posting periodic updates to the blog with snippets of this kind of analysis.
Of course, with the number of questions in this survey and the number of responses we got, there’s a whole lot of options for comparisons and correlations we can check – enough that we could probably spend months and months analyzing things from different perspectives (and probably will!). There’s so many interesting avenues of investigation that it can be hard to choose which ones to start on first – but that’s where you all come in:
What kind topics or comparisons would you most like to see analyzed?
Please make suggestions in the comments!
If you need a refresher of what kinds of things we asked about in the survey, you can see the survey text here.
Examples of possible suggestions for analysis could include:
- Breakdowns of one question based on responses to another question: e.g. “Were gender identity ratios different among people with different romantic orientations?”
- Analysis of questions not included in the preliminary report: e.g. “What were the race breakdowns for Canada?”
- Analysis of more specific subsets: e.g. “What about the average age for just people who post on AVEN?”
- Anything else you can think of!
While some results will take longer depending on the difficulty of analyzing them (for example, write-ins take a fair amount of time to backcode), knowing which things people are most interested in helps us figure out what to prioritize!
We do ask though that you keep requests limited to information we actually have from the 2014 survey, not suggestions for future surveys – for example, we can’t answer questions like “what are asexuals’ favorite colors” because we didn’t ask about favorite colors. We’ll make a call for future survey topics in the future, so save those ideas for then 🙂
It also helps when you have specific requests – for example, “analyze every question with splits by race and gender and orientation!” is something we’d love to do eventually, but “can you look at how answers to the question “do you feel welcome in LGBTQ and Queer communities” differs based on the respondents race?” is something we can actually answer in a reasonable amount of time.
Preliminary Findings from the 2014 AVEN Community Census
Just in time to wrap up Asexual Awareness Week, preliminary results from the census are now available!
- Download the Preliminary Findings Report (pdf file): 2014 AVEN Community Census Preliminary Findings Report
- You can also view the original survey text (pdf file): AVEN Survey 2014 – View Questions
The Preliminary Findings Report is a brief summary of some of the raw data from the survey, to give you an early glimpse of some of the results – it doesn’t contain finalized numbers and it doesn’t address all topics from the survey, but it should be just enough to whet your appetite for more!
We will also begin posting some more shorter snippets of analysis here in the form of blog posts.
Also, many thanks to everyone who took the survey! We couldn’t have done it without you.