Introduction of this new app has been making the rounds on the web over the last few days. The new app has garnered so much attention that the news release on the Indiana University website is inaccessible (link here, if you can manage to view the page). However, ScienceDaily published the original news release. Here are some snippets:
Indiana University has released Kinsey Reporter, a global mobile survey platform for collecting and reporting anonymous data about sexual and other intimate behaviors. The pilot project allows citizen observers around the world to use free applications now available for Apple and Android mobile platforms to not only report on sexual behavior and experiences, but also to share, explore and visualize the accumulated data.
"People are natural observers. It's part of being social, and using mobile apps is an excellent way to involve citizen scientists," said Julia Heiman, director of The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction. "We expect to get new insights into sexuality and relationships today. What do people notice, what are they involved in, and what can they relate to us about their lives and their communities?"
[...]
"This new platform will allow us to explore issues that have been challenging to study until now, such as the prevalence of unreported sexual violence in different parts of the world, or the correlation between various sexual practices like condom use, for example, and the cultural, political, religious or health contexts in particular geographical areas. These were some of our initial motivations for the project," he said. Users simply download the free app and begin contributing observed information on topics such as sexual activity, public displays of affection, flirting, unwanted experiences and birth control use. Even though no information identifying users submitting reports is collected or stored, the time and general location of the report is collected and input into the database. Users also have the option of selecting their own geographic preference for the report by choosing city/town, state/region or country.
Jezebel has published a short piece about the app, with some of their own commentary and an update on the status of the project:
New App Helps You Keep a Log of All the Nearby Boners
Kindly monitor the boners, please! For science!
A new mobile app from the Kinsey Institute encourages users to (anonymously) report and share sexual activities that they witness or participate in—aggregate data which will then be logged and analyzed by Kinsey researchers. The goal is to hopefully map geographical trends and cultural phenomena ranging from flirting to birth control, that might enlighten some dimmer corners of human sexuality. It's like sexting your professor! Kind of! If your professor was the entire internet.
In the project's first hours after launch, people from all over the United States and Europe had added tags about sexual activity, ranging from subjects as innocent as "man" and "woman" to more provocative phrases like "increased desire" and "infidelity."
The project doesn't collect identifying information from users, but does store the time and general location of the report. That means if you comment about "man flirting" in Portland, as one subject did, the project will be able to collect both that tag and the city, but won't display a name.
"This new platform will allow us to explore issues that have been challenging to study until now," said Filippo Menczer, director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, in a press release, "such as the prevalence of unreported sexual violence in different parts of the world, or the correlation between various sexual practices like condom use, for example, and the cultural, political, religious or health contexts in particular geographical areas. These were some of our initial motivations for the project."
I'm not sure how accurate a bunch of self-reported, crowd-sourced sex data will be (specifically, the sexual observations of adults affluent and idle enough to have both smartphones and time for this project), but it's a pretty amazing idea. At the very least—not even mentioning the implications for public health and sexual violence research—it just backs up the notion that sex is normal, sex is everywhere...