Peachy keen advancement: Artful info-graphics
What are we looking at:
The gold and leather padded rings that the peaches rest on represent a proportional breakdown by income level of people who are both interested in spanking as part of romantic engagements, AND who have never tried it out themselves.
Purpose:
As director of education for the Center for Positive Sexuality (https://positivesexuality.org/) , I decided to spend some time looking in to data that could help the identify populations who might be most interested in the information we have to offer, and also might be most interested in donating to the org in order to further research and the impact our advanced safer-sex education programs could offer.
Data hunting:
I looked through a number of publicly available collections of data sets. As sexuality in general is significantly underrepresented in research locating usable data in and of itself took time and exploration. Of the research that were potential options, a number of resources were incomplete in some way that made them unusable, such data being present, but no access to the surveys that were used to be generate the data, or the reverse, or the data being highly limited etc. Research from Indiana State’s Sexual Diversity research was selected as a starting point (Herbenick, D., Bowling, J., Fu, T. J., Dodge, B., Guerra-Reyes, L., & Sanders, S. (2017). Sexual diversity in the United States: Results from a nationally representative probability sample of adult women and men. PloS one, 12(7), e0181198. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0181198) as even though as of this data exploration, it is now a few years old, it was seemingly done robustly (approx ~2000 participants), looks in to more diverse sexual experiences than many (such as behaviors commonly related to BDSM, engagement with some sex-work, consensual non-monogamy etc.) and also gets some demographics for the participants including age, general income range, education level and ethnicity.
Data Cleaning:
Data was disseminated in a file format commonly used by software that was outside of the current budget, so the files first needed to be opened and converted in to a usable format (CSV in this case). Once explorable, the data itself looked very intact and clean. However, the categories were coded obtusely with only references to the question number and sub-questions each response related to (ie. “Q13_c”). The main key for the break down was derived from a secondary file that the original authors wrote as a programming script for their initial analysis of the data.
Findings:
Looking at the subset of people who indicated that they were very interested in some impact play (for example spanking) there was a fairly large contingent who had never engaged in it. Virtually all of these people reported that they had never attended a class related to sexuality. When this was further broken down by reported income levels, people making making $100-125k were overwhelmingly represented in this intersection of responses, while people making $150-175k were by far the fewest. Indicating that engaging with people who’s income lay in the $100-125k range may be more likely to be interested in the information provided by the Center, as well as being potential being in positions to help the org’s advancement team in their mission. A peachy keen win-win, all around.
