Attraction
Who you are drawn to, who you have been with, and what you call it — asked as three separate questions, because they are.
- Questions
- 9
- 3 min
- Attraction, behaviour and identity, on independent axes
What this is
Three things this is built on. Attraction, behaviour and identity are separate dimensions that describe overlapping but different groups of people — in Laumann's 1994 survey, of women reporting any same-gender sexuality, 88% reported attraction, 41% behaviour and 16% a lesbian or gay identity — so every serious survey asks them apart and so does this. The intensity questions use independent axes, following Storms (1980), rather than one line from straight to gay: a single line cannot represent being drawn to nobody, because it puts that in the same place as being drawn to everybody. And nothing here decides anything about you. The Kinsey Institute states that no official Kinsey scale test exists; AVEN states that no test can determine whether a person is asexual; the National Academies concluded in 2022 that no attraction measure has been validated for assigning an identity. This arranges what you said. The words are yours.
Where it comes from
written down, not impliedAttraction, behaviour and identity, on independent axes
Attraction, behaviour and identity are asked as separate questions, the way large population surveys such as the NSFG, Natsal and the UK census keep them, with Storms (1980) for treating each intensity as its own axis. The Kinsey scale descriptions and the Klein grid are not used.
Written for this app
- Reliability
- not measured
- Factor structure
- not measured
- Validity
- not measured
Further reading
- Storms, M. D. (1980). Theories of sexual orientation (opens in a new tab). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38(5), 783–792original source
- Laumann, E. O., Gagnon, J. H., Michael, R. T., & Michaels, S. (1994). The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States (opens in a new tab). University of Chicago Pressoriginal source
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2022). Measuring Sex, Gender Identity, and Sexual Orientation (opens in a new tab). The National Academies Pressreview
Read the result as a structured version of what you said, not as a measurement of you.
Why these questions carry no evidence
Every questionnaire in this app writes its own items, because the framework behind an instrument is usually public while the published questionnaire is copyrighted. That is the honest way to build it and it has a cost worth stating plainly: reliability and validity belong to a specific set of questions given to a specific group of people, not to the name of the idea behind them. These questions have never been given to a sample, have no norms, and have no evidence that they measure what they are named after.