I have some questions about the relationship between polyamory and one’s personality.
This survey is open to people who are not aromantic-asexual and who are either in one or more consensually non-monogamous relationship(s) or single but open to being poly.
Page three contains some questions about material that may be triggering or upsetting. These questions are skippable; please skip them if they cause you distress.
Please take the survey here. I will leave it open for the next few weeks and tell you what my hypotheses are after Christmas, as well as whether the data shows them to be correct. I would strongly advise people not speculate in the comments about what I’m trying to look at, because I do not want to bias people who are taking the survey.
Thing of Things 
Could you elaborate on the “not aromantic-asexual” thing? Are aro-spectrum people all considered ‘aromantic’ for these purposes?
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If you would feel comfortable rounding yourself to “heteroromantic”, “homoromantic”, or “biromantic” for the purposes of the survey, then feel free to do that; if you wouldn’t, then probably do not take it.
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I’m curious how this turns out. A couple things:
1. There were a few repeated questions.
2. I excluded kink activities from the questions about hitting etc., but the survey doesn’t explicitly say to do so.
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#1. Gave it a surreal, creepypasta feel that I enjoyed.
#2. Same with “love as friend or fellow human being” vs “romantic love.”
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1. Yes, I am working on that.
2. I am using a Real Psychological Inventory and thus I don’t really want to edit the questions.
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I suppose #2 explains this, but I definitely also noted an absence of questions on *why* people are poly.
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You could write a note before those questions saying something like “The following excludes situations where your partner as explicitly agreed to these actions”, which wouldn’t be editing the question?
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One reason not to want to edit questions would be to be able to compare rates of answers on this survey to other surveys that have used the same questions. For that purpose, the note would be similarly problematic. FWIW, like Cliff, I also interpreted it as excluding consensual kink.
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The first page has questions where ‘monogamous but bad at following directions’ is a possible answer. Do you want people who are monogamous but bad at following directions to refrain from taking the survey? The instructions request only poly people take the survey.
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Monogamous people who are bad at following directions will have their answers removed from the survey, but they can certainly fill it out if e.g. they like pressing buttons.
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Given that my first thought when I saw the description (different part, in my case) was ‘aw but I love surveys’ (before I found out that I was indeed eligible), I appreciate this 🙂
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You might want the monogamous data for comparison. Otherwise you won’t be able to distinguish “personality traits of poly people” from “personality traits of your subscribers”. I daresay neither group matches the general public.
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This will probably be a bad idea, since your control group will now entirely consist of people who are bad at following directions 😛
And that in addition to the problem that the readership of this blog is not exactly representative of society at large. I’d probably just go with literature values.
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There are certainly a lot of people providing advice about the correct way to measure something where they don’t know what it is.
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Just started it, and I guess you probably can’t change this now, but, having “disagree” on the right and “agree” on the left threw me for a loop at first…
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The “disagree on right, agree on left” thing messed me up too. I caught it halfway through and flipped all my answers, but almost missed it.
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I am really sorry about that and I would fix it if it wouldn’t make a horrible mess of all my data.
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Am I eligible for the survey if I would hypothetically be open to (or even prefer) polyamory, but practically I’m in a committed monogamous relationship and prioritize preserving the relationship over realizing that preference?
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Nope, sorry!
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This is also clearly at the people who actually wrote the questions, but the ‘how many times has X happened during disagreements’ questions are suffering from lack of a denominator. ‘I’ve done thing X twice in disagreements’ is going to mean something rather different if you’ve had two disagreements (or 0) vs one a week.
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What if we are currently in a monogamous relationship, but were previously in a poly relationship? Would that data be of use to you?
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No.
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I had a lot of trouble estimating how many times I’ve done “X” in an argument but I gave it a shot. Also excluded kinky/consensual activities from the hitting/slapping questions.
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I said monogamous but bad at following directions because my partner and I are polyamorous in theory, we’re both open to the possibility of multiple partners but neither one of us are really willing/able to exert the energy required to maintain relationships with multiple partners.
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If you answer “yes” to any of the “bad at following directions” questions, your data will not be included in the final survey.
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Oh well, good thing I do enjoy pressing buttons!
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I got confused when questions switched from asking about “sex” to asking about “sexual intercourse”. Decided to treat these as synonyms and interpret broadly.
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I’m not currently in a relationship, but I’ve been the one who the poly/open person has been with occasionally. So I don’t know if I count as poly myself since I’ve never been the main.
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You would put yourself as “not currently in a relationship but open to polyamory”.
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I am currently in a relationship with one person. However, they have another partner, and previously, including while I was in a relationship with them, I have myself had other partners. I entered as “I am in polyamorous relationship(s)” and entered “1” for number of partners. Will I be counted in the survey?
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Yes.
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Survey design note: your readership is probably skewed whether or not it’s poly; you could get maybe more useful data by also asking non-poly readers to take it too, even if all of the questions you’re currently thinking about wouldn’t require that.
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My curiosity as to what conclusions you will be able to draw about polygamy from a survey excluding monogamy is killing me.
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(Spoilers comment, read after taking it). Cerfhznoyl guvf vf nobhg ubj qvssrerag fhofrgf bs cbyl crbcyr ner qvssrerag. Fb ybbxvat ng fnl, ubj ahzore bs cnegaref inevrf jvgu rkgebirefvba, ubj urnygu bs eryngvbafuvc inevrf jvgu nzbhag bs pnfhny frk. Gung fbeg bs guvat. Rira va ebg13 V jba’g fcrphyngr nobhg juvpu barf Bml pnerf nobhg. Ohg guvf zhpu frrzf pyrne gb zr sebz gur qrfvta.
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So to be clear the violence related ones are excluding BDSM and Martial Arts related activity right?
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A lot of the personality questions I would feel one way about the first descriptor and the opposite about the second, which meant my answers tended toward neutral.
Also, some of your violence questions don’t specify whether consensual kink counts.
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In which commentators continue to nitpick and drive Ozy to distraction:
I found the use of “and” to be problematic, since the two things linked are not really similar. Logically I should answer “strongly disagree” to such statements since while I am extremely critical I am not at all quarrelsome; likewise I am very enthusiastic… about my introvert activities. But the way the questions are written makes me think that they are intended not to trigger a false response to an AND operation but rather as an attempt to cast a wider net.
And don’t even get me started on the cliche of “creative = unconventional”
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I imagine people would disagree more strongly with “I am [thing I am not] and [other thing I am also not]” than with “I am [thing I am] and [thing I am not]”?
Maybe.
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I am not in a romantic/sexual/QP relationship and have never been in one, but I am open to polyamory. I answered “never” to all the questions about “your partner” or that had the survey taker being in a relationship as a premise — I hope this doesn’t skew your data, feel free to strike me off (female asexual)
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Most of these questions are unanswerable and/or coercive, often I could only give one answer to what was actually two different and unrelated questions, I tried my hardest to answer with conclusions that didn’t compromise the data but this was more often than not impossible.
I’m sorry for failing to answer this survey, if you’d like to make a follow up survey I’m more than happy to help you/direct you to resources in making surveys that maintain scientific integrity. (I know it’s quite difficult)
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All of the questionnaires I used were instruments commonly used in psychological research that have been previously tested for validity and reliability. I am sorry you found them difficult to complete.
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What does ‘validity’ and ‘reliability’ mean in this context?
I think that one can define these in very different ways, where questions can easily be valid and reliable under one definition and not at all under another.
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In the case I think people are complaining about the most, reliability is test-retest reliability and validity is correlation with other measures of the same thing, patterns of predicted external correlates, and correlation with other people’s ratings of how much the person has a particular trait.
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OK, but I suspect that a question like ‘Do you dislike Hitler and ducks?’ has high test-retest reliability as well, since pretty much anyone has stronger feelings about Hitler than about ducks, so effectively it will always be answered as ‘Do you dislike Hitler?’. It’s still a bad question that conflates two different things.
As for correlation with other measures, how do you avoid a logic loop there? When is a question similar to another measure? When the outcomes correlate, right? So validity merely means that there is a correlation. There is no sure way to determine that one method actually measures the same as another method, you can also be measuring confounders.
The risk here is that you find that Neo-Nazis consistently answer no to that question and that you find that this correlates well with other Neo-Nazi beliefs, so you conclude that the answer is a good one. But then you conclude that Neo-Nazis love ducks and that everyone else hates them, because you misunderstand what people are answering yes or no to.
Of course, this example is intentionally silly and extreme to make my point, but the same thing can happen more subtly.
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May I share this in a Facebook poly group? It has ~50 members, so it won’t go super viral if you’re not comfortable with that.
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Sure, go ahead!
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Somewhere there was an incredible article about “if you’re overly literal, how to answer multiple choice questions in the most helpful/representative way, and if necessary, most likely to be accurate for medical diagnosis, and least likely to get you arrested over a misunderstanding”
Like, it both empathised with frustration in answering things when they were accidentally ambiguous, and also gave practical advice on what to do if you needed to answer something for medical or legal reason.
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