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:

1. Breakdowns of one question based on responses to another question: e.g. “Were gender identity ratios different among people with different romantic orientations?”
2. Analysis of questions not included in the preliminary report: e.g. “What were the race breakdowns for Canada?”
3. Analysis of more specific subsets: e.g. “What about the average age for just people who post on AVEN?”
4. 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.