You make an excellent point. This particular study, the NSSHB, is very quantity-focused but it's not the entirety of our work. This study is meant to be a contemporary snapshot of sexual behavior in the US and, on a large scale, quantity often makes a lot of sense to capture. However, we did also ask about pleasure, arousal and orgasm (not just how many, how often).
Our team engages in a great deal of other work. Right now, I'm working on a study of women who experience pleasure and/or orgasm during exercise (see more: s/womenandexercise ) and another study on women's experiences of desire during long-term relationships (this study will soon be posted on MySexProfessor.com, which is my blog, though you can also keep track of our work at sexualhealth.indiana.edu).
Researchers on our team study a wide range of issues including condom use, adolescent sexual behavior, the experiences of bisexual men and women, and much more. We agree that quality is very important - not just quantity - and thank you for raising this.
We did not study this particular question, although there are many scientists who study sex and the media. You may be interested in the work of our colleague Dr. Bryant Paul at Indiana University who conducts related work.
Yes, it does! You can find all sorts of details by age and also by relationship status in the full report at nationalsexstudy.indiana.edu. We will be releasing more details about gay, lesbian and bisexual sexual behavior in the near future so stay tuned to our web site, www.sexualhealth.indiana.edu, for more information.
We didn't look at family structure per se in this study.
Yes, the popular media often conduct their own online polls and magazine polls. However, these are quite different from scientific studies that are carried out differently. Scientists who study sex spend a great deal of time, and have significant training, to write questions that help people to report honesty and with clarity about their sexual lives. We also worked with a group called Knowledge Networks that specializes in national sampling so that those who answer the survey end up being representative of people living in the US at the time of the study. It's a very careful, strategie and scientific process. Once the data are collected, they are analyzed in more nuanced ways than one finds in magazines. The papers are then subject to scientific peer review, which is when a scientific journal asks other scientists to blindly review the articles and to critique the studies to improve the papers. By the time the papers are released, they have been vetted by our team of scientists at Indiana University as well as other scientists who served as anonymous reviewers.
You can learn more about the methods and sampling in our report at nationalsexstudy.indiana.edu.
Did your survey discuss female ejaculation and the proportion of woman who do?
I wish we'd had the time, space and funding to do so! This is an understudied area of human sexuality. I wrote about the topic, and what we do and do not know, in my book Because It Feels Good: A Woman's Guide to Sexual Pleasure & Satisfaction.
With all kinds of sexual content freely available on the internet, are people becoming more open to experimentation into things that were previously less common (exhibitionism, etc), or are those things holding steady?
Unforunately, we don't know the answer to this question. The last nationally representative study of sexual behavior in the US, which was conducted in 1992, did not ask about too many less common (or at least less commonly talked about) sexual practices. We did not have the time, space or funding to do so either. I would be very interested in conducting such a study in the future. I would imagine that, with increased access to information through books, the Internet and even travel (and meeting new people/learning about other cultural practices) that there is greater experimentation compared to 50 or 100 years ago but I don't have the data to prove it one way or the other.
We have data related to region and education, but have not looked at the data in this way (yet). We will be releasing additional data over the next year or two, so stay tuned for more through our web site www.sexualhealth.indiana.edu or my blog, MySexProfessor.com.
We didn't ask the question in that way. However, we did ask how people identify (e.g., gay, lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual) and also we have reports that demonstrate what proportion of men and women have engaged in various types of same-sex or other-sex sex. These details are in nationalsexstudy.indiana.edu
We haven't analysed the data in this way yet, but will soon, and will report on it when we do.
Several smaller scale studies in different communities in the US have found increases in anal sex as well, in recent years. Our study confirmed this to be the case on a national level. Although anal sex has become a more common practice in the US, it remains infrequent. As such, I would hope that those who engage in it "sometimes" keep things on hand that might make for a safer and more pleasurable experience, such as water-based lubricant and latex condoms. I've written in greater detail about anal sex for women in Because It Feels Good. There are also several good anal sex-specific books that provided detailed information (a particularly good one is Anal Pleasure & Health: A Guide for Men and Women).
Thank you for adding this to the discussion!
I have a blog (MySexProfessor.com) that I update in regard to my current work - research, education, columns and books. However, our Center's work is centralized through www.sexualhealth.indiana.edu and I would also recommend keeping up to date with The Kinsey Institute at www.kinseyinstitute.org and our Kinsey Confidential site (www.kinseyconfidential.org) for Q&A, podcasts and blog posts. Thanks for asking.