A reevaluation of online pornography use in Germany using a combination of web tracking and survey data

Abstract

Several researchers have questioned the reliability of pornography research’s findings as they may, e.g., be biased by social desirability. Following a recent call to make use of more reliable data sources, we conducted two studies to investigate patterns and differences as well as predictors of online pornography use (OPU). In our first study, we used data from a large-scale German online web tracking panel (N = 3018, website visits on domain level) gathered from June 2018 to June 2019. We looked at group differences as well as temporal trends. Overall, our results confirm existing findings from questionnaire-based research related to sex and age differences. Our data also shows temporal patterns, which indicate that – for the majority of users – OPU constitutes a form of leisure time activity that competes with other spare time activities but also family and social obligations (we found the lowest amount of pornography use on Christmas). In our second study, we linked the web tracking to data from an online survey (N = 1315) to reassess the relevance of various predictors of OPU that have been identified in previous research. As in Study 1, our results mostly echo previous findings. Online pornography is used more by males and younger individuals, while relationship, sexism, and social dominance orientation are not associated with OPU. However, we do find differences in OPU between members of different religious communities. With our two studies, we were able to confirm some key findings on OPU from previous questionnaire-based research using web tracking data, while also being able to engage in more finely-grained analyses of usage patterns.

Fantasy Made Flesh - A Network Analysis of the Reciprocal Relationship Between Sexual Fantasies, Pornography Usage and Sexual Behavior

“…Men appear at a higher risk for adverse effects of pornography use as they show an, on average, higher disposition for violence (Ferguson et al, 2008). Furthermore, one of the most replicated findings in pornography research is that men use on average more pornography, show different usage patterns and prefer different content types than women (Hald & Štulhofer, 2016;Petersen & Hyde, 2010;von Andrian-Werburg et al, 2022). Adding this to our reasoning about pornography use, sexual fantasies, and behavior, we asked separately for each sex: RQ1: Can sexual fantasies, sexual behavior, and pornography use be modeled in a network?…”

“…Moreover, the questionnaire method is prone to a social desirability bias, especially when applied to porn research (Kohut et al, 2020;Rasmussen et al, 2018;Willoughby & Busby, 2016). However, recent findings of von Andrian-Werburg et al (2022) suggest that major findings of pornography research can be replicated with web tracking data. At least in Germany, social desirability appears not to be a considerable issue in questionnaire-based research about sexuality.…”

Analysis of Web Browsing Data: A Guide

“…A subset of trace data concerns people's activity when seeking out and consuming online information-so-called web browsing or web tracking data. Researchers use such data to explore a wide variety of phenomena across the social sciences, from ideological polarization (Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2011) and selective news exposure (Nelson & Webster, 2017) to online shopping (Santos et al, 2012) and porn consumption (von Andrian-Werburg et al, 2023). Browsing data hold great potential, especially when linked with surveys (Stier, Breuer, et al, 2020), but their characteristics also raise statistical questions less common for traditional data sources.…”