Summary Findings from the 2016 Ace Community Census and a 2015 Executive Summary

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We are excited to share with you the summary results from the 2016 Ace Community Survey and an Executive Summary from the  2015 census.

2016 Report

2015 Executive Summary

We were a little behind schedule, but have been catching up with additional volunteers. There are additional data analysis and blog posts that we hope to get to to dig deeper. If you a researcher you can also request the data itself.

Also, many thanks to everyone who took the survey! We couldn’t have done it without you.

And this is a reminder to take the 2018 Ace Community Census here! (Deadline extended for another week)

We need your help: Volunteer for the Survey Team

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We are no longer accepting more volunteers. Thank you all!

The Ace Community Survey Team is currently looking for new volunteers, particularly people with programming or writing skills, as we try to work on our backlog of data and get out more analysis to the public.

The Survey Team is responsible for designing and releasing the Ace Community Survey each year.  The Asexual Community Survey is one of the biggest data sources of quantitative data about asexual-spectrum people, which also means there is a lot of work to be done analyzing it.

The major roles that we currently need volunteers for are:

  • Basic analysis of survey data
    • We use Python for most analysis, but even people without experience in Python can learn how to use it.
  • Exploratory analysis of survey data
    • We need curious people who can analyze data, and produce results that are of interest to the ace community.
  • Improving code infrastructure
    • We’d like to further streamline our data analysis by writing more user-friendly code.
  • Reading and interpreting text responses
    • In many places, survey respondents have the option to write text responses to questions, and these responses need to be interpreted!  No programming ability is necessary, but you must be familiar with ace concepts and terminology.
  • Writing reports
    • Even when the analysis is done, we still need to summarize the results.
  • Translation of reports into other languages
    • In order to make our reports more accessible to speakers of other languages, we’d like to translate them.  This is especially helpful for languages spoken by people with low English fluency.

If you’re unclear on the details, don’t worry, as we do training to help people understand the ins and outs of the survey.

Time commitments are flexible depending on your availability at any given part of the year, but we recommend setting aside at least 4-5 hours a month to do work on your own time, plus an hour for monthly team meetings.

If you’re interested, please fill out this form by the end of November, and allow 1-2 weeks for a response.  (If you fill out the form at a later date, the response may be slower.)  If you’d like more information, you may contact us at asexualcensus@gmail.com.

The 2018 Survey is still open for responses!  To ensure that you have a chance to respond to it before it closes, we advise that you take it before November 15th.

The 2018 Ace Community Survey is now open!

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The 2018 survey is now closed!  Thanks to all who participated!

It’s that time of year again – we are now recruiting participants for the Ace Community Survey!

The Ace Community Survey, run by the Ace Community Survey Team, collects valuable information on the demographics and experiences of members in the ace community, including asexual, demisexual, gray-asexual, and related identities. It is the largest survey of ace communities and creates a valuable pool of data for future ace community activists and researchers.

The survey is open to anyone: ace, non-ace, or still questioning; as long as you are 13 years of age or older we want to hear from you! We want to get a wide variety of responses from as many parts of the community as possible, so we encourage you to share this link with any other potentially interested individuals you know or any ace communities you participate in.

Click here to take the 2018 Ace Community Survey: https://goo.gl/forms/0iOOOCbD5OX0pT3S2

You will be able to view any published results from the survey at asexualcensus.wordpress.com. The 2016 report will be coming out on Saturday October 27th. If you would like to automatic email update when new results or announcements are posted, you can subscribe here.

For answers to common questions about the survey, please see the FAQ here.

Infographics from our 2016 survey

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We’re happy to release a peek into the 2016 data! We’ve put together two visualizations based on the 2016 Ace Community Survey. Check them out!

The text of the 2016 survey can be found here.

Update on 6/28/2018: The infographics now have creative commons licenses.  The “Experiences with sex” now excludes non-ace respondents.

Interactive visualizations from our 2016 survey

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You can now play with the data! We’ve put together some interactive visualizations from the 2016 Ace Community Survey. You can explore respondents’ experiences with relationships and sexual violence with the ability to filter by age, gender, transness, and ace identity.

The text of the 2016 survey can be found here.

2017 Raw Data Now Available to Researchers

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We are pleased to announce that raw data from the 2017 ace community census is now available for researchers wishing to perform additional analysis!

If you are a researcher and would like to request a copy of the raw data, please fill out the new data request form here. Raw data from 2014-2016 is also available.

In addition to the raw data, we are also making available interpreted data from 2014-2015.  That means that for questions that allowed written responses, we read those responses and coded them into categories.

If you have any questions, please contact us at asexualcensus@gmail.com.

The Experiences of Intersex Respondents in the 2014 Ace Community Census

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Happy Intersex Awareness Day! And Happy Asexual Awareness Week! We took a deeper look at intersex statistics from our 2014 Ace Community Census and are excited to share with you the 2014 Ace Community Census Report on the Experiences of Intersex Respondents.

This report focuses on the experiences of ace respondents who identified as intersex and ace respondents who indicated that they might be intersex, are waiting for test results, have a diagnosis that sometimes is considered intersex, and other explicitly stated reasons.

While the question of whether or not someone was intersex was originally asked in the 2014 survey, its distributions were not reported on in the 2014 AVEN Community Census: Preliminary Findings report. We are glad we can share them with you now.

And this is a reminder to take the 2017 Ace Community Census here!

Summary Findings from the 2015 Ace Community Census

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Happy Asexual Awareness Week! We are excited to share with you the summary results from the 2015 census.

We know it has been a long time coming, but we have considerably more volunteers as of very recently and should be able to get reports out faster in the future. One of the main reasons this report took so long is that we back coded, or read through and included all write in responses where we could. This is time intensive and should be more manageable with a larger number of volunteers. You might also notice that this report is a bit longer than 2014, which also took additional time.

There are additional data analysis and blog posts that we hope to get to to dig deeper. If you a researcher you can also request the data itself.

Also, many thanks to everyone who took the survey! We couldn’t have done it without you.

And this is a reminder to take the 2017 Ace Community Census here!

Take the 2017 Ace Community Census!

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Update: the 2017 Census is now closed. Thank you to everyone who participated! Check back in late October of 2018 for next year’s census.

It’s that time of year again – we are now recruiting participants for the Ace Community Census!

The Ace Community Census is an annual survey by the Ace Community Survey Team, which collects valuable information on the demographics and experiences of members in the ace community. It is the largest survey of ace communities and creates a valuable pool of data for future ace community activists and researchers.

The survey is open to anyone: ace, non-ace, or still questioning; as long as you are 13 years of age or older we want to hear from you! We want to get a wide variety of responses from as many parts of the community as possible, so we encourage you to share this link with any other potentially interested individuals you know or any ace communities you participate in.

Click here to take the 2017 Ace Community Census: goo.gl/NXTn5g

You will be able to view any published results from the survey at asexualcensus.wordpress.com. If you would like to automatic email update when new results or announcements are posted, you can subscribe here.

For answers to common questions about the survey, please see the FAQ here.

We Need Your Help – Volunteering with the Survey Team

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Update: This search for volunteers is no longer ongoing.  You may still contact us to volunteer, but we may be a bit slow to respond as we currently aren’t dedicating resources to it.

Hello all! The Survey Team is currently looking for new volunteers, particularly people with programming or writing skills as we try to work on our backlog of data and get out more analysis to the public.

As you probably know if you are reading this blog, the survey team is the team that does the Ace Community Census each year. The Census is one of the major sources of quantitative data about asexuals, which also means it is a lot of work. We actually collect more data than our current volunteers have time to process, which is why we are looking for additional volunteers to join the team:

The major roles that we currently need volunteers for are:

  • Analyzing survey data (primarily using Python and/or R)
    • We currently use Python 3 for most of our analysis, which is where we are currently most in need of assistance. We also use some R for our data preparation, so knowledge of R is also welcome.
  • Writing up survey results, either as primary summary reports or one-off blog posts
    • No special software skills required, just a general familiarity with statistical analysis and semi-formal academic writing (think class report more than published thesis).
  • Responding to data requests from researchers (by evaluating requests, sending the appropriate data, and forwarding any questions to the appropriate team members)
    • No software or statistics skills required. Mostly requires good communication skills and the ability to check for and respond to email updates ~once a week.
  • Translation of the survey into additional languages:
    • We do not have the capacity to analyze additional surveys. Having an archive of data for another language may still be beneficial, or if someone with those language skills could help analyze data it would be most welcome.

If you are familiar with Python and some statistics, we strongly encourage you to help us analyze the survey. Without this we cannot complete our reports on the previous surveys. Knowledge in R is also welcome, since it has been used for data preparation.

For the reports, we just need people with good English academic writing skills – no special knowledge required, although a basic understanding of statistical analysis is recommended so that you can understand the things you are writing up.

In general, the roles in the survey team are flexible, with team members often assisting with several aspects of the survey and changing roles as needed.

Primary analysis of each year’s survey begins in late November after the survey has closed, but due to the current backlog of data we have from past years, analysis is currently conducted year-round.

Time commitments are flexible depending on your availability at any given part of the year, but we recommend setting aside at least 4-5 hours a month to do work on your own time, plus monthly team meetings. (Note that team meetings may be more frequent in the couple of months leading up to the survey release in late october).

If you are interested in helping the survey team, please contact the Survey Team directly at asexualcensus@gmail.com. While new team members are considered on a rolling basis, we are ideally looking for volunteers who can start by September 10th. Please allow 1-2 weeks for a response.