A review of pornography use research: Methodology and results from four sources

Abstract

The widespread electronic transmission of pornography allows for a variety of new data sources to objectively measure pornography use. Recent studies have begun to use these data to rank order US states by per capita online pornography use and to identify the determinants of pornography use at the state level. The aim of this paper is to compare two previous methodologies for evaluating pornography use by state, as well as to measure online pornography use using multiple data sources. We find that state-level rankings from Pornhub.com, Google Trends, and the New Family Structures Survey are significantly correlated with each other. In contrast, we find that rankings based on data from a single large paid subscription pornography website has no significant correlation with rankings based on the other three data sources. Since so much of online pornography is accessed for free, research based solely on paid subscription data may yield misleading conclusions.

Moral Incongruence and Pornography Use: A Critical Review and Integration

“…Since those early debates, research related to internet pornography use and purported addiction has grown extensively (for reviews, see: (Duffy, Dawson, & das Nair, 2016;Gmeiner, Price, & Worley, 2015;Ley & Grubbs, 2017;Ley et al, 2014;Walton, Cantor, Bhullar, & Lykins, 2017). Yet, despite this expansive growth, the debates over the addictive or nonaddictive nature of Internet pornography rage on (Ley et al, 2014;Williams, 2017).…”

How do Google searches for symptoms, news and unemployment interact during COVID-19? A Lotka–Volterra analysis of google trends data

“…Many studies have already investigated how COVID-19 affected the level of concern for the health and the economic situation (Mertens 2020 ; Trueblood 2020 ), or people’s increased searches for news (Horowitz Research Center 2020 ) and unemployment filings (Tian and Goetz 2020 ). However, no study has looked at the simultaneous interactions among these three key consequences of the pandemic.…”

Factor structure of the Cybersex Motives Questionnaire

“…Although the Internet might be considered a powerful tool that provides access to a wide variety of information and therefore aids globalization, it has also quickly become a kind of refuge where people’s fantasies flourish without real-life consequences and where some people with important health issues get lost in its depths. Only a few studies have focused on one particular use of the Internet that has succeeded from the beginning and continually grown in popularity: cybersex ( Gmeiner, Price, & Worley, 2015 ). Cybersex can be defined as the use of online sexual activities, such as pornography, live sex shows, webcams, or chat rooms.…”