You are invited to participate in the "Sexual Personality" research project developed by the Museum of Sex in collaboration with Professor Lee Silver (Princeton University) and Professor Kristen Mark (University of Minnesota).
The primary goal of this research is to gain insight into whether sexual personality traits map inside well-known traits such as extroversion or empathy, or are unrelated domains of mental expression.
To reach this goal, we are looking for tens of thousands of adult participants who are able and willing to carefully consider their degree of attraction to, or repulsion from, mental attitudes, emotions, and beliefs . . . of a sexual nature.
On completion of the survey, we will send you a confidential interpretation of your results in comparison to all other survey-takers.
To learn more about the principal scientists, procedures, data privacy protections, benefits, and who to contact with questions, scroll through the following window.
Project Title — Sexual personality.
Research leaders: Principal Investigator Professor Lee M. Silver, Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University; Scientific collaborator,
Professor Kristen Mark, PhD, MPH, a behavioral health scientist and tenured professor at the Institute for Sexual and Gender Health in the University of Minnesota Medical School.
Your participation in this research does not involve any substantive risks. You will not be charged, and you will not be paid to take the survey. Most people complete the survey in about 15 minutes, but you can take as long as you like. We are not aware of any alternative service or company that can provide you with a comparable scientific report.
The Museum of Sex has a strong commitment toward your right to privacy. To learn more about this policy, please click here. All information provided by you through this website will undergo automated encryption and loading onto a secure Museum server. Researchers will only be given access to anonymized data files stripped of all personal identifying information. Thus, it will not be possible to link your survey responses back to you. The anonymized results of our research may be used for teaching, research, publications, presentations at scientific meetings, and future research studies without additional informed consent.
Project details Over the last 70 years, tens of thousands of scholarly articles have been published with statistical analyses of data obtained from a variety of personality and attitudinal surveys. Until recently, nearly all studies involved manual collection and analysis of survey responses from samples of 500 persons or fewer. Such small samples are greatly limited in statistical power especially in terms of resolving population-level structure.
Our proposed study will use computational tools developed for high resolution detection of genetic structure in large population datasets with over 100,000 participants. We have modified these tools for the analysis and discovery of high dimensional associations among different personality and attitudinal traits. Samples incorporating data from 10,000 to 200,000 participants will be used to determine the effect of sample size on resolution and statistical power.
Professor Silver and Professor Mark will develop a list of items to be included on the survey. Items will cover conventionally surveyed personality traits as well as attitudes concerning sexual emotions, desires, and behavior. This mixture will allow an evaluation of associations, or lack thereof, between established personality traits and particular sexual attitudes. The list of items will be sent to curators and software engineers at the Museum of Sex for implementation as a web-based online survey with fully automated, anonymous data collection. At regular intervals, Museum staff will send researchers an email containing a batch file of at least 1,000 anonymized responses. Researchers will use programs in the computer language Python to analyze the data.
Who to contact with questions
If you have questions about this study that are not answered here, please contact researchers at sextypeme@museumofsex.com. If you have questions involving your rights as a research participant, please contact the Assistant Director of the Princeton University Institutional Review Board at (609) 258-8543 or irb@princeton.edu.
