In the last several decades pornography in the U.S. has become more mainstream, more accessible, more phallocentric and more degrading to women. Further, consumption of pornography remains a major difference in the sexual experiences of men and women. Yet research has not addressed how opposition to pornography has changed over the this period, despite shifts in the accessibility and visibility of pornography as well as new cultural and legal issues presented by the advent of Internet pornography. We examine gender differences in opposition to pornography from 1975 to 2012, measured by support for legal censorship of pornography in the General Social Survey. Results show that both men's and women's opposition to pornography have decreased significantly over the past 40 years, suggesting a cultural shift toward "pornographication" affecting attitudes. However, women remain more opposed to pornography than men, and men's opposition has declined faster, so the gender gap in opposition to pornography has widened, indicating further divergence of men's and women's sexual attitudes over time. This is consistent with the increasingly normative nature of pornography consumption for men, increases over time in men's actual consumption of pornography, and its increasingly degrading depiction of women.

In the last several decades pornography in the U.S. has become more mainstream, more accessible, more phallocentric and more degrading to women. Further, consumption of pornography remains a major difference in the sexual experiences of men and women. Yet research has not addressed how opposition to pornography has changed over the this period, despite shifts in the accessibility and visibility of pornography as well as new cultural and legal issues presented by the advent of Internet pornography. We examine gender differences in opposition to pornography from 1975 to 2012, measured by support for legal censorship of pornography in the General Social Survey. Results show that both men’s and women’s opposition to pornography have decreased significantly over the past 40 years, suggesting a cultural shift toward “pornographication” affecting attitudes. However, women remain more opposed to pornography than men, and men’s opposition has declined faster, so the gender gap in opposition to pornography has widened, indicating further divergence of men’s and women’s sexualattitudes over time. This is consistent with the increasingly normative nature of pornography consumption for men, increases over time in men’s actual consumption of pornography, and its increasingly degrading depictionof women.

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Survey researchers conducting pretesting via cognitive interviews or focus groups often use vignettes to evaluate questions and answer categories in order to identify possible measurement problems, particularly for reporting situations that are relatively rare or for sensitive topics. Although research has compared the performance of vignettes in Spanish and Asian languages in cognitive interviews, there is little research that compares the performance of vignettes across pretesting methodologies in languages other than English. To address this gap, we investigated the performance of a vignette about a homeownership question that was administered in focus groups and cognitive interviews conducted in seven languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Russian, and Arabic. We coded the cognitive interviews and focus group summaries to quantify the responses and the types of comprehension problems respondents had, and we compared the vignette response data from cognitive interviews to the data from focus groups, by language. We find that administering the vignette in cognitive interviews was more effective than administering the vignette in focus groups for uncovering difficulties respondents had with the survey question, particularly for Spanish-and Arabic-speakers. We conclude that using vignettes in focus groups without cognitive interviews may not reveal problems with survey questions as effectively. Regardless of methodology, the vignette task was challenging for certain language groups, and further research is needed on the cross-cultural adaptation of vignettes.

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