I realise it’s a bit forward of me to ask, but I really need to know: have you had sex recently?

In the business of market research you have to be prepared to ask all kinds of things and it’s surprising what people will talk to you about just because you’ve asked them a question and, perhaps unusually, are really listening to the answer.

But there’s a problem with words. They don’t always mean the same thing to different people. And yet we can get so comfortable with the mental pictures we attach to linguistic labels we can easily forget.

Cultural differences are often, but not always, easy to recognise: you could ask an English person how they felt at winning the lottery and they might well tell you it was ‘nice’! Meanwhile, an American might define a slightly altered recipe of peanut butter as ‘awesome!’.

George Bernard Shaw once quipped that the England and America “…are two countries divided by a common language.”  However, even within countries the interpretation of words can vary dramatically.

In a study by the famous Kinsey Institute in Indiana, they discovered that there was no uniform consensus what the phrase ‘had sex’ meant. Around 30% of people, presumably not all Bill Clinton, didn’t consider oral sex to be sex. 20% didn’t consider anal sex to be sex.

There are, inevitably, significant implications from this study for health professionals who might otherwise make assumptions when they are discussing sexual matters with patients.

But there are much wider issues for market research.

People inevitably make assumptions with language when designing questionnaires, interpreting responses or analysing what people have said.

When you factor in the human capacities for being unconsciously primed by an unrelated or peripheral event and confirmation bias (whereby we unknowingly select the evidence that fits our prior perspective) the risk of error is significant.

To return to my question: “Have you had sex recently?” I would expect the word ‘recently’ to require definition. But if people can’t agree what the term ‘had sex’ means is there any point in asking the question?

(And that’s before all the other problems with market research have been factored in!)

Source:Indiana University. “No Consensus in Definitions of ‘Had Sex,’ Study Finds.” ScienceDaily 5 March 2010. 10 March 2010

Image courtesy: Brandon Warren