What’s wrong with the Playboy sex survey?

Posted by on September 17, 2009 
Filed Under In the news

PlayboyThis morning the Alligator ran a story about Playboy’s new survey of sexual behavior among college students in the U.S. (Thanks to @andrea25th and @andrewjosays for drawing my attention to it on Twitter.) Here’s the Alligator’s lead: “The secret is out: College kids like a lot of sex. According to Playboy’s most recent college sex poll, that is.”

Now, I haven’t received my copy of been to the library to check out the latest issue of Playboy yet, but the Alligator’s story raises plenty of eyebrows about the study. This story is a great opportunity for you to put what you’ve learned in class so far to the test.

Before I offer my take on the Playboy poll and the Alligator story about it, I’d like to know what you think about it:

Let’s hear from you—after you’ve finished your first reaction paper, that is.

Comments

5 Responses to “What’s wrong with the Playboy sex survey?”

  1. Andrew on September 17th, 2009 11:16 pm

    -Just like Cosmo, you have a certain group of people who are subscribed to Playboy on a regular basis. In the 2nd paragraph, they say that Playboy’s poll was distributed via “Web site for the magazine’s October issue”. Therefore your sample set may not be so dependable. Another standard weakness that applies to almost every other poll is the fact that some of the people may not follow the honor code and “taint the results”. Because the majority of the people who took the poll are probably subscribers to the magazine, I would say it’s assumed that many of these people have their hormones think for them rather than sitting down and actually thinking about their past experiences. I guess the only strength is to see how big of a freak some people subscribed to Playboy can be.

    -In my honest opinion, I’ve drawn to the conclusion that the results of the poll were to be expected. From what I’ve seen so far, I can definitely see 15% of the people having sex every day.
    On the other hand, It surprised me that almost 1/5th of the sample were virgins. Does that mean that they did not answer the rest of the questions that were given? Or were they forced to just stuff the ballot?

    -I would say Misner did a very thorough investigation. I was actually surprised to read how he analyzed the poll rather than actually going through every category and humiliating random UF students with their viewpoints.

    -Being a Campus-Run Newspaper, I’m pretty sure many of the writers of The Alligator have the same mindset as us all. Their viewpoints and attitudes towards subjects such as these may be similar to ours. The only difference is the fact that they manipulate their words and phrases to fit the “article standards” (with the fancy vocabulary and phrases).

    That’s about it. :] Let’s see what you have to say.

  2. E'lon on September 18th, 2009 12:00 am

    I’m not sure what the specific questions were, but If it’s play boy, first the poll will only be answered by those interested in playboy. Next, if the questions are sexual I’m not sure if the question was “How often” or “How much”sex, but I think it’s implied that the poll is taken only out of the students who are sexually active. Even if the question was not just exclusive to those who are sexually active, I don’t think alot of virgins would answer a play boy poll, unless they were trying to make a point

  3. etchedglass on September 18th, 2009 9:49 am

    Reading through the results and the article about it, what struck me the most was that only 20% of the respondents were women, while more than 50% of the college student population as a whole are women.

    This disparity isn’t unexpected among playboy subscribers, but it still an example of a non-representative sample, when the claims are being extended to the college student population as a whole.

  4. Irene on September 20th, 2009 3:55 pm

    I mean you also have to take into consideration how many students they surveyed; only 5,000 male and female across the country. There are nearly 50,000 students in the University of Florida alone! Just because a majority of the group of surveyed students admitted that they had participated in some sort of sex act, does not mean that the majority of ALL college students should be considered non-virgins. Also, they never mentioned the ages of the participants. There are many students in college who are married or old enough to admit that they are having sexual relations with someone (meaning in their early or mid-twenties). So what makes everyone think that “a lot” of college students really do like sex?

  5. asksexpert on September 26th, 2009 12:24 am

    Women’s Sexuality Still in the Dark Ages

    Women’s sexuality continues to be angst-ridden in spite of advances in medicine,communication and plain activism. When I started to write my book,” Love and Sex for Dummies”, I was first foremost moved to do so by the vast amounts of wrong information that both men and women have about themselves. In my practice in the UK and the USA,I have come across scores of women who being affected by some serious problem, hesitate
    to discuss it with me. In my book, which is the first of a three part series, I have taken the
    commonsense approach of explaining clearly what sexuality is all about and go on to clear
    doubts through questions and solutions that have been culled from my casebooks.

    Woman are being made to think about themselves in conceptual and representational terms which effectively separates the inexhaustible power that woman have in themselves to extract anecdotal past memories from the very beginning of civilization. Let me give one example, the onset of puberty in a woman. In many Hawaiian societies, the “coming of age” of a girl is celebrated with a feast, the girl is dressed in her best, there is laughter everywhere, people joyous, for their little girl has now become a woman. Contrast to this, the girl in the so-called civilized West is made to feel that the onset of menstruation is disgusting, that if she is not careful she may become pregnant and that she better makes sure she stays out of the way.. I am told by my colleagues that in a great many Indian upper castes, even now girls and women who are menstruating are made to isolate themselves, food served to them like they do to prisoners in solitary confinement and they are not supposed to enter the kitchen.

    This reticence about natural bodily functions and other associated illness that develop because of this reticence continues to this day. “If I don’t talk about it may be it will go away” seems to be the attitude that stays in most of modern women too. One of the reasons for this attitudinal problem can be traced back to early history when the women were seen more as procreators and were expected to do nothing more than have children,
    look after the cows, the kitchen, the garden and gather the berries in autumn!. And stay in
    the background. Various feminist history scholars have maintained that over centuries women have been kept under complete subservience to men. If the woman fell ill or developed some complication of childbirth, why it was far easier to get another “wench” and do away with this one.

    For more information visit: http://www.asksexpert.com/womensexuality

    well written…