QUEBEC – Whenever I see a headline starting with the words “science says” or “science reveals,” I immediately suspect I’m about to read a lump of bullshit written by someone vastly overstating the certainty of the scientific claim in question.
In looking at the study that serves as the basis for the headline “Science Reveals 3 Types Of Porn Users: Which Of Them Is Actually Healthy?” my suspicions were once again validated.
The study referred to in this headline is called “Profiles of Cyberpornography Use and Sexual Well-Being in Adults,” conducted by researchers at the University of Montreal.
To arrive at their (quite tentative) conclusions, the researchers first assembled a “convenience sample” — which in this case involved a population of 830 respondents gathered from social networking sites, online classified ad postings and similar sources. In other words, this was not a randomly selected group of the sort researchers use when they want to achieve a respondent sample which is broadly representative of the general population.
The convenience sample respondent pool then answered a series of survey questions, which can be found here. Once they had responses in hand, the researchers conducted a cluster analysis that divided the respondents into three subgroups: “recreational” online porn viewers, “highly distressed/non-compulsive” porn viewers and “compulsive” porn viewers.
The researchers found recreational users “reported higher sexual satisfaction and lower sexual compulsivity, avoidance, and dysfunction,” while compulsive users “presented lower sexual satisfaction and dysfunction and higher sexual compulsivity and avoidance, and the highly-distressed but less active (less active than compulsive, that is) were “sexually less satisfied and reported less sexual compulsivity and more sexual dysfunction and avoidance.”
By the numbers, 75.5 percent of the survey respondents fell into the recreational category, while 12.7 percent were highly distressed/non-compulsive and the remaining 11.8 percent were categorized as compulsive. In terms of gender demographics, women and couples were over-represented in the recreational category, while a high proportion of the compulsive user subgroup was men.
So, has “science revealed” there’s three types of porn viewers? Not even close.
What this study says is a non-random, non-representative sample of 830 users can be divided into three groups based on an analysis of survey responses that may bear no resemblance at all to the actual viewing habits of the respondents.
I’m not about to pin any of the exaggerated response to this study on the researchers, simply because they aren’t the ones hyping the claims. Attribution for the absurd exaggeration falls in the usual places: Journalists, bloggers, headline-writers and social media users who appear to believe, reflexively, any claim prefaced by the words “science reveals.”
It’s also clear Dr. Marie-Pier Vaillancourt-Morel, the lead author of the study, doesn’t feel she unearthed anything alarming or earth-shattering during the survey.
“Pornography use seems to be problematic for sexual wellbeing in two groups of users: a group of high-frequency, compulsive users and a group of low frequency users who report significant emotional distress mostly expressed through shame and self-disgust,” Vaillancourt-Morel said. “However, pornography use does not unequivocally lead to adverse sexual outcomes given that, for 75 percent of our sample, no negative sexual outcomes were observed. Thus, the number of recreational users was high.”
Presumably, Vaillancourt-Morel would also concede this study only suggests the conclusions she stated, because as a trained psychological researcher she is certainly aware a convenience sample cannot be considered representative of the general population. This is why researchers endeavor to use random samples, control groups, double-blind trials and other indispensable methods of the research trade.
Every fact-checker has a different way of rating the truth of a claim. The Washington Post has its Pinocchio Test, Politifact has its Truth-O-Meter and so on.
Along those lines, I’m hereby rating this headline’s claim of science “revealing” three types of porn viewers a “Wheelbarrow of Bovine Excrement.”
This might sound bad, but the TechTimes headline writer shouldn’t take it too hard. The rating is merely the midway point between a minor white-lie “Cow Patty” and the major whopper of a “Whole Fucking Rodeo.”
