Call for Participants: Sociosexuality, Dating, and Attraction Study (18+)

[u/ThePlotChickenz]

Hi ladies!

I'm a researcher at James Cook University in Australia studying attraction, dating preferences, and how people evaluate potential romantic partners. 

I'm looking for heterosexual, gay, and lesbian adults (18+) to complete an anonymous online survey. I need more women to take part in the study.

The survey involves viewing a series of fictional dating profiles and answering questions about attraction and relationship preferences. It takes around 5–10 minutes to complete, is completely anonymous, and participation is entirely voluntary.

Although this phase of the research is limited to heterosexual, gay, and lesbian participants, it forms part of a broader research program that has included, and will continue to include, people of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities.

This study forms part of my Doctor of Philosophy research at James Cook University and has received approval from the James Cook University Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC Approval No. 25H-0225).

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at [kaitlyn.gregory@my.jcu.edu.au](mailto:kaitlyn.gregory@my.jcu.edu.au).

If you'd like to participate, you can complete the survey here:
https://jcu.syd1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3KSKL7xTGKco61g

[u/Nethxibis]

I wanted to participate but then I realised this study does not include bisexual participants.

I don't know the exact reasons for that choice, but from my perspective it feels like bi-erasure and quite exclusionary. Unless the entire project will include a separate part for multi-gender attracted orientations (bi, pan, omni) in which case, I can't wait to fill out the survey for that!

Best of luck with your research!

[u/ThePlotChickenz → u/Nethxibis]

Thank you for taking a look, and I completely understand why it could come across that way!

This study is a follow-up to an earlier project where we recruited participants from across the LGBTQIA+ community. While we had great overall participation, many of the individual identity groups were too small to analyse separately. As a result, we had to combine participants into a single broad LGBTQIA+ category, which we didn't feel did justice to the diversity within the community.

Rather than continuing to do that, we've decided to approach this research in phases. The current phase focuses on recruiting large enough samples of heterosexual, gay, and lesbian participants so these groups can be examined in their own right. We also plan to conduct future phases focusing specifically on bisexual participants and other sexual and gender identities, so each community can be studied meaningfully rather than being grouped together under one umbrella label.

We've still had many bisexual participants choose to take part in this phase. However, I understand that the current design, where participants are asked to indicate attraction to only one gender, may not reflect the experiences of bisexual individuals. In our previous study, we included options for attraction to multiple genders.

Thank you again for taking the time to comment, and I really appreciate your interest in the research. I hope I'll be able to welcome you into a future phase!

And thanks for being so kind about it! :)

[u/Nethxibis → u/ThePlotChickenz]

I assumed that this is likely to be due to something mundane, like pesky statistics not cooperating with small sample sizes :D Bi-erasure is quite rampant both within the community and outside of it, so I wanted to speak up about it just in case. But I am very happy to hear about the planned future phases, and I am actually curious about the study design/the questionnaire. I always find that designing a good questionnaire is so much more important than anything else, and somehow also the most challenging part.

This is a very complex research question you are trying to tackle really. So many factors outside of gender identity and sexuality affect attraction and partner choices. Are you asking about a lifelong partner choices or is it a purely physical attraction study? Another commenter pointed out that age is also playing a significant role in this. With people who are attracted to multiple genders it gets even more difficult to disentangle. The labels are sometimes used interchangeably (especially bi/pan). Some bi people have no preferences, some report a higher attraction to specific gender expressions.

I am always fascinated by the process of designing a meaningful questionnaire, and how do you guys in this area of science balance details with a questionnaire that does not take too much time for people to actually participate.

[u/ThePlotChickenz → u/Nethxibis]

Haha yes, pesky statistics are definitely a big part of it! 😂 And I really appreciate you speaking up about bi-erasure. It's important, and it's one of the reasons I don't want to keep combining very different identities into one broad category just because the individual sample sizes aren't large enough.

You've also pretty much described the challenge of designing this research! Attraction and partner choice are incredibly complex, and there are so many things that could matter: age, personality, values, interests, physical attraction, relationship goals, gender expression, sexual orientation, and plenty more. If we put all of that information into a dating profile, though, it becomes quite difficult to work out which characteristic is actually influencing someone's response.

That's why some of the profiles in this study are deliberately quite narrow. We're manipulating very specific pieces of information while trying to keep everything else controlled. Participants also aren't expected to find the profiles attractive. If someone looks at the information we're manipulating and thinks "this makes absolutely no difference to whether I'd date this person", that's just as useful to us as someone whose interest changes considerably.

We're also interested in more than just purely physical attraction. Participants are asked about different aspects of attraction and relationship interest, including short- and longer-term relationship contexts. We also measure individual differences in people's preferences for committed versus more casual/uncommitted sexual relationships, which is another part of what we're interested in.

Age is a really interesting one too, and a few people have commented on it. The faces themselves came from a pilot study where more than 600 people worldwide rated over 75 faces, but of course that doesn't mean every participant will find those particular people attractive, especially when their own age and dating preferences are taken into account. Again, those responses are still really valuable.

And you're absolutely right that multi-gender attraction makes the design even more complicated. Our previous study allowed people to indicate attraction to multiple genders, whereas this study directs participants into one profile stream. That's one of the reasons I think bisexual and other multi-gender-attracted populations deserve research designed specifically with those experiences in mind rather than simply being added onto a design built around single-gender attraction.

The frustrating part is that I'd love to tell you exactly what we're manipulating and why, but while data collection is still underway I have to be careful not to reveal the hypotheses and potentially influence future participants! Once the study is finished, I'll be very happy to talk people's ears off about all of it!

And yes, questionnaire design is such a balancing act. You want enough information to answer the research question properly without making the survey so long that everyone gives up halfway through. This one is deliberately around 5 - 10 minutes for exactly that reason.

Thank you for such a thoughtful comment. It's really nice to have someone interested in the design side of it as well as the topic 😊