Week 1 Update

An update dedicated to background information (not entirely, so don’t worry!): the Kinsey Reporter is an app that allows anyone to record any type of sexual behavior they see/observe/participate in anonymously. The data can be seen here. The Kinsey Reporter is part of the Kinsey Institute, which does a wide range of studies regarding sexual behavior

. It is a non-profit institute at Indiana University; I read an article on IU’s website that discussed the goal of the Kinsey Reporter (can be read here). According to Filippo Menczer, director of IU’s Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, some of the initial goals of the Kinsey Reporter were to explore issues that are difficult to study, like observing the prevalence of unreported sexual violence or the correlation between various sex practices around the world.

With this in mind, we can understand how the Kinsey Reporter is able to obtain such discrete information with the help of the Kinsey Reporter, which allows for anonymity for it’s citizen science participants. While going to through some of the Kinsey Institute’s published articles, I found the variance between research experiments very extraordinary. However, I could not find information that might have linked the Kinsey Reporter to any of them.

In any case, let me direct this conversation towards our group’s project. The Kinsey Reporter has data which shows that recorded flirting has been seen mostly at home, in public, or through text messages. Interestingly, parks and places of worship are not places where flirting is often observed; school flirting is also rather low, but is close in numbers to store and club flirting. When flirting is recorded, the app asks questions such as “gender of person flirting, flirting behavior, location, outcome, and age. Flirt behavior and outcome has several categories from which to choose from (more than one can be selected). If our group was to adhere to recording flirting in the same fashion as the app, we can hope to illustrate more accurate data that can be used as a correlation to the data found on the Kinsey Reporter website.

Our group has already decided on three locations to record information: Central Park (park), Times Square (public), and Brooklyn College (school). These locations are readily available to us and the Kinsey Reporter has data on flirting in parks, schools, and public spaces. Furthermore, in just these three general locations, the app has an abundant amount of information, so our project, which is limited to flirting in three locations, can still show interesting and reliable patterns with the Kinsey Reporter!

Unfortunately, the Kinsey Reporter app does not appear to isolate data trends found in specific regions of the world, such as finding flirting trends specifically in New York City, or even in New York. Thus, we can only hope to find correlations between our data and data gathered from around the world. Upon researching flirting in new york city, I learned that apparently, flirting is illegal in New York City and can be charged with a fine of $25. In any case, I hope to have another update posted soon about “flirting” research and how it ties back to the Kinsey Reporter and our project.