Documenting Pornography Use in America: A Comparative Analysis of Methodological Approaches

Abstract

Estimates of pornography use in the United States range widely. We explore the reasons for the variation in such estimates among U.S. adults using data from four different recent nationally representative samples—each of which asked a different type of question about pornography use. We attribute the notable variation in estimates to differences in question wording and answer options, and assert that a survey question asking respondents about their most recent use of pornography minimizes recall bias and is better poised to assess the overall prevalence of pornography in a population than is the more common approach of asking respondents about their historical general-use pattern. When we privileged the most-recent-use approach, survey data from 2014 reveal that 46% of men and 16% of women between the ages of 18 and 39 intentionally viewed pornography in a given week. These numbers are notably higher than most previous population estimates employing different types of questions. The results have ramifications for methods of surveying sensitive self-reported behaviors and for contextualizing scholars’ claims as well as popular conversations about the reach and implications of pornography use in the United States.

Declaration of Interest

In addition to their academic positions, Mark Regnerus and Joseph Price are senior fellows at the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture, which underwrote the data collection for the Relationships in America (RIA) survey with a grant to the University of Texas at Austin (IRB Protocol No. 2013-11-0039). Regnerus and Price were not compensated and report no conflicts of interest. David Gordon is a graduate student in the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University. Prior to that, he was a (paid) research associate at the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture. The authors declare that they are solely responsible for the content of this article.

Notes

¹ The National Study of Youth and Religion, whose data were used by permission here, was funded by Lilly Endowment Inc., under the direction of Christian Smith, of the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, and Lisa Pearce, of the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

² Knowledge Networks (KN) recruited the first online research panel (the KnowledgePanel) that is representative of the U.S. population. Its members are randomly recruited by telephone and mail surveys, and households are provided with access to the Internet and computer hardware if needed. More information about it, including panel recruitment, connection, retention, completion, and total response rates, are available directly from KN. The typical within-survey response rate for a survey using its panel is 65%. Each case in the NFSS and RIA samples was assigned a weight based on the sampling design and their probability of being selected, ensuring a sample that is nationally representative of American adults within the age range of each survey (18 to 39 for the NFSS; 18 to 60 for the RIA).

³ The Poisson distribution is used in similar applications and has been employed in past research to model the frequency of occurrences of an event within a specified time period, such as the number of visitors to a website in a given time period (Sharpie, De Veaux, & Velleman, 2010); the number of births, deaths, suicides, and homicides in a given period of time (Weiers, 2008); or the number of customers who call to complain about a service problem in a month (Donnelly, 2012).

⁴ As noted earlier, the RIA reinterviewed 907 respondents who completed the NFSS, enabling us to compare their responses to different questions. Of the 275 persons who said that they had “never” viewed pornography in the 2014 RIA, 17 (or 6%) had reported some pornography usage within the past year in the 2011–2012 NFSS. Although this does not constitute strong evidence for significant social desirability bias associated with pornography usage questions, it is suggestive of its presence.