Wow everyone! Thanks for all of the well wishes! The defense went great. I am currently in the act of making all of the little formatting changes and addressing the questions that my committee had in the text of my thesis.
I promised everyone that I would share the results of the survey, so let's get started shall we?
I want to start by saying that I will not be posting my entire thesis on-line. I am doing this for several reasons, one of which is that it is still undergoing the finishing corrections at the moment. Another reason is the fact that that I will be looking into publishing some of this information, so I do not plan to have it posted anywhere. Let's hope that some day we see this information in print someday eh?
I would love to discuss my findings with all of you. Give me your opinions, we can toss ideas around. I will give all this info over the course of several posts over the next few days...this is a lot of info okay?
First off, let's talk about what the sample was made of:
91 (62.8%) males and 54 (37.2%) females
Average age was 44.4 years (SD = 9.7 years)
Ages ranged from 25 to 81
93.1% of participants reported their race as Caucasian, 4.1% reported their race as Hispanic, 1.4% reported their race as Asian Pacific Islander, .7% indicated their race as Latino, and .7% noted their race as Other
Most participants self-reported being married (84.1%), followed by married but separated (4.1%), engaged (3.4%), unmarried (3.4%), divorced (2.8%), and widowed (1.4%). Only a small percentage (.7%) of the sample failed to report marital status
Most of the sample reported their sexual orientation as being exclusively heterosexual (47.6%), followed by heterosexual mostly (37.9%), heterosexual somewhat more (10.3%), and equally heterosexual or lesbian/gay man (4.1%). A small portion (4.6%) of the sample reported having an exclusively lesbian or gay sexual orientation
Length of time that participant’s had been involved with their partners were as follows: 7 months to 9 years (37.2%), 10 to 18 years (29.7%), 19 to 27 years (19.3%) 28 to 36 years (11.7%), and finally, 37 to 45 years (2.1%)
Additionally, chi-square tests of independence were performed to ascertain if gender was related to relationship status and sexual orientation. In the present study, a person’s relationship status was significantly related to their gender, X2(5) = 15.37, p<.01. In the sample, the primary differences found between the genders were that more males were married than were expected to be by chance alone, whereas fewer females were married than expected by chance.
In addition, gender and sexual orientation were significantly dependent upon each other, X2(3) = 35.51, p<.001. In the current sample, males were more likely to be “exclusively heterosexual” and less likely to be “heterosexual somewhat more” than was to be expected by chance alone; conversely, females were less likely to be “exclusively heterosexual” and more likely to be “heterosexual somewhat more” than was expected by chance alone.
Length of time spent swinging ranged from 6 months to 30 years (M=6.59 years, SD=6.57 years), with most (62.0%) reporting swinging for 5 years or less.
Most (83.4%) of the sample reported open swinging, followed by soft swinging (8.3%), only a small (7.6%) portion of the sample reported practicing closed swinging.
That's all for this post,
Rachel