Today’s post is by Orchard. First off an introduction of myself is in order as this is my first actual post! I’ve been around for a while writing behemoth-sized responses to threads which then require massive digestion on the parts of readers. I’d apologize for that, but doing so might imply some level of contrition or intention to stop. Since neither is the case, I’ll say that I am aware that it does cause some people’s brains to go into shock mode. I am a research associate at a large educational research organization and my background is in Industrial/Organizational Psychology–all of which means that I study human behavior for a living and I have a strong background in statistics and good research methodology. I am also a writer by nature–it’s not a matter of if I write, but what.
Recently, I stumbled upon this little gem of a study (warning–link goes to pdf) over at a blog (which I do not regularly read, but one of my friends does) called Gene Expression (first link goes to summary, second link goes to actual study). Two facts immediately jumped out at me from looking at the map of the United States all coded–first off, Utah, with it’s incredibly dense population of LDS members is one of the highest consumers of online pornography and second, Idaho, with a nearly equally high density population of LDS is among the lowest. What gives? Unlike the Gene Expression folks, the conclusion of religiosity fails to satisfy me as an immediate explanation.
This data was collected by asking a single provider of multiple sources of online pornography to provide the zipcodes of all subscribers in their database. This is actually a very solid method, although (as I’ll discuss a bit more later on) having a second provider for this same information would go along way to make this an ever more useful study. From a methodological viewpoint, however, there is little to argue with.
The author of the study is careful to normalize the data to account for income after looking at the raw data–which is a good idea. After this adjustment, the following table (looking at the far right column) shows that Utah has the highest subscription rate and Idaho has the lowest: 1.89 versus -1.11.
Note that in the table below the data in the far right column has been adjusted for market demographics such as household income, household size and similar factors. Note that it doesn’t matter HOW you slice it, Utah is STILL the highest subscriber and Idaho is STILL one of the absolute lowest. There is something seriously odd about that.
From the original article, the author makes this following statement:
“Subscriptions are slightly more prevalent in states that have enacted conservative
legislation on sexuality (regression results on file with the author). In the 27
states where “defense of marriage” amendments have been adopted (making
same-sex marriage, and/or civil unions unconstitutional), subscriptions to this
adult entertainment service are weakly more prevalent than in other states (p
0.096). In such states, there were 0.2 more subscribers to this adult web site per
thousand broadband households, 11 percent more than in other states. (Edelman, 2009, p. 11)”
But in looking at Wikipedia we see that Utah is 58% LDS (I know, the bane of scholarship–I was doing so well and then I go to wikipedia for my census data!) and Idaho is about 22.8% LDS. It’s a big difference. It also makes me think that all the talks I’ve been hearing in General Conference about pornography are pretty much on target, but depressingly ineffective. From the study:
The fourth column reports that in regions where more people report regularly
attending religious services (per National Election Studies 2004), overall subscription
rates are not statistically significantly different from subscriptions elsewhere
(p = 0.848). However, in such regions, a statistically significantly smaller proportion
of subscriptions begin on Sundays, compared with other regions. In particular,
a 1 percent increase in the proportion of people who report regularly attending
religious services is associated with a 0.10 percent reduction in the proportion of
purchases that occur on Sunday. This analysis suggests that, on the whole, those
who attend religious services shift their consumption of adult entertainment to
other days of the week, despite on average consuming the same amount of adult entertainment as others. (As an interesting comparison, Malhotra, 2008, finds that
religious people are more charitable only on Sundays.) (Edelman, 2009, p. 10)
This suggests that whatever lessons we are hearing on pornography are not effective in achieving their goals (at least, not in Utah). Now there are some alternate conclusions that I would like to put forward, lest I be thought to be unnecessarily harsh.
First it is entirely possible that in states with very conservative laws about access to pornography that those who are not religious are using the internet to access material that they have trouble getting otherwise. This is a pleasing idea, but fails to explain the Sunday-only drop in online sales. A second idea is needed to explain that: perhaps these people are spending more time with their family or are otherwise engaged on Sundays, and are therefore less inclined to make the sales at that time. It may be that the family is home more, and therefore they have less opportunity for viewing on that day. Numerous plausible explanations exist to deal with the Sunday-only drop. Occam’s Razor doesn’t really apply here since we are not really adding more assumptions in either case.
Second, there is a major flaw in the study–it should be noted that this is an analysis of data from only one particular online provider of pornography (and the author of the study is aware of this limitation and notes it as such). This isn’t a show-stopper, but it is something to consider. It could well be that a different purveyor of pornography possibly provides pertinent information of a different sort. Alliteration aside.
So here’s the question: the data are available on the matter, do you agree that this is a problem that is tied to religion or is it better explained by something else? If it is a problem unique to religion what else can the church do to help achieve the goals of reducing interest in this? I know that not everyone is going to agree with that goal, but I will say that regardless of your views on the subject, it is fairly easy to agree on the idea that the CHURCH has the goal of reducing viewership of pornography by it’s adherents. What more can the church do that will actually be effective? Because there does seem to be a problem.