Understanding Asexuality

Now let’s consider a general issue that may affect the reporting rate of asexuality, regardless of how it is defined. This issue is volunteer bias, and it is related to an issue mentioned above: people who choose to participate in sex studies (relative to those who choose not to) are more liberal in their sex attitudes, more interested in sex, and have more sexual experience (e.g., Bogaert, 1996; Morokoff, 1986; Saunders, Fisher, Hewitt, & Clayton, 1985). This issue is called volunteer bias because there is bias in favor of recruiting certain types of participants over others in human research studies. Volunteer bias is a potential problem in all human studies, but it has been argued to be especially problematic in studies of sexuality, which, as mentioned previously, seem prone to over-sample sexually liberal people. If so, the rate of asexuality may be higher than reported in sexual surveys, because people with less liberal sexual attitudes/behavior often decline to participate in such surveys. This is even true in the best studies we have: national probability samples, such as NATSAL-I and NATSAL-II. For example, the so-called refusal rate—those who were contacted to participate but chose not to—in NATSAL-I was about 30 percent; in NATSAL-II, it was even slightly higher (around 35 percent). Thus, a high number of asexual people may not have agreed to participate in past sexual surveys because they were uninterested in or uncomfortable with the subject matter of these surveys: sex. A sex survey? Why on earth would I want to do that? It is a bit like getting a call from the Professional Golfers Association wanting to talk about your favorite courses, your handicap, the type of clubs you use, and your preferred brand of ball, and you declining to participate because you don’t play and, frankly, don’t want to start playing. What! You don’t want to talk intimately about golf for an hour? (I use this as an example because I am a golfer but have, over the years, somewhat reluctantly come to terms with the fact that the game is, evidently, not of interest to everyone.)

Interestingly, then, some of the best sexuality data, including the best data on the prevalence of asexuality, may come from national samples that are not, per se, sex surveys. Thus, the NSFG survey mentioned above may be a better survey to assess asexuality than the NATSAL surveys, because the former was a “general health survey.” However, as mentioned, this study also has its problems: no clear asexuality measure and a restriction of age range.

So, how many people are asexual? We do not know for sure, as there are different problems—such as volunteer bias, lack of a long-term time frame, and questions about how best to define asexuality—with each of the national studies mentioned above. However, the original estimate (Bogaert, 2004) of 1 percent may not be a bad one, all things considered, and it is possible that it may underestimate the true number of asexual people.[16]