2011 reader survey preliminary results

My sample size for the reader survey is now ~200. I’m aiming for ~500. If you are a regular reader of this weblog, please consider filling out the survey. The software is telling me that the average reader is taking about ~10 minutes. All questions are optional, so you can quickly skip over confusing ones or those which you don’t want to divulge.

The results so far are here. At least for the questions which weren’t open ended. I added a lot of open ended numeric questions so that I could run some scatterplots and more natural statistics (i.e., I don’t have to convert categorical responses into numerics and so forth).

To give a taste for the kind of stuff I’m running on the nerd-heavy data set I thought I would explore how # of sexual partners relates to age and IQ. First, let me admit that I assume that the IQ distribution of the readership here is somewhat artificially shifted upward (to the right of the distribution). Those with higher IQs are more likely to know their IQs. And whether unconsciously or consciously individuals will almost certainly self-report results which are drawn from the higher range of their results distribution. Additionally, since the readers are ~85% male there’s an expectation that there’ll be a slight padding of the # of sexual partners. But since I’m really curious about correlations I’ll assume that these biases are independent across the two result sets.

Below are some simple summary statistics, density distribution plots and scatterplots. Also some information on the virgins for those who are curious.

Age: median: 34, mean: 37, standard deviation: 13.

# of sexual partners: median: 4, mean: 8, standard deviation: 21.

IQ: median: 135, mean: 133, standard deviation: 11.

The people with 200 sexual partners are ridiculous, so I yanked those few outliers out of the data set (I’m not judging, I’m just saying that the promiscuous readers tend to make the charts hard to read).

# of sexual partners & IQ: correlation ~0.03

# of sexual partners & Age: correlation ~0.37

I was curious if there was a relationship between IQ and # of sexual partners controlling for age, so I ran a partial correlation. There wasn’t. The correlation was -0.03 with a p-value of 0.71. So amongst the readers of this weblog there isn’t a relationship between # of sexual partners and intelligence (sorry Geoffrey Miller!). Of course the distribution of IQs is not natural. The lowest reported values were 100, which is the American population average. The median of the distribution would come in at exactly the 99th percentile. This is almost certainly too high, but I doubt the median is much lower than the 90th percentile.

Finally, the virgins. Here are there ages & IQs: