United States Women and Pornography: Methodological Experiment Update

Abstract

Pornography is one of the most popular forms of media and pornography research is common in high impact sexological journals. Many studies on U.S. adults’ pornography consumption have utilized the National Science Foundation funded General Social Survey (GSS), which has provided nationally representative publicly available data since the early 1970s; however, there are multiple reasons to question the validity and predictive capacity of the GSS’s traditional pornography measure. The present study compared the traditional GSS pornography measure with a new, experimental GSS pornography measure following the methodology of an early study of adult U.S. women’s pornography use published in this journal. The results supported the validity and predictive capacity of the traditional GSS measure while simultaneously suggesting the superiority of the GSS’s new measure. Implications for the GSS and pornography measurement beyond the GSS are discussed.