Aromantic (& Asexual) Research

[TripleA]

Aromanticism

Asexuality

For a while, I've been working on a spreadsheet to compile research and experiences of asexuality, and I've just started one for aromanticism as well. If there is anything I could add to any of these, let me know and I'll take a look. 

Edited June 6, 2020 by TripleA

[aspecofstardust]

I'm highlighting aspec related research and content on twitter for pride this month @aspec_stardust! We're only 5 days in but plenty more coming that I think you'll be interested in including. I'll have a round-up post on my blog (aspecofstardust.wordpress.com) at the end of the month too. I also have most if not all of the pdfs for the articles I mention so if there's a resource you'd like to have let me know and I can send it to you.

[Mark]

On 6/6/2020 at 1:47 AM, TripleA said:

For a while, I've been working on a spreadsheet to compile research and experiences of asexuality, and I've just started one for aromanticism as well. If there is anything I could add to any of these, let me know and I'll take a look. 

Whilst it's good that you have been able to compile this list I can see some issues:
This is a very short list. Only nine items.
None of these are professional or academic research. Which means they are not citable for Wikipedia (or similar).
 
Going through them:
Aromantic Gender Experiences: The survey demographics seems very skewed. With cis people, especially men, underrepresented. 
Allosexual Aromantic Survey Results: There's a specific bias of only including allosexual people. Again the demographics seem skewed. Both in terms of gender and sexual orientation.
Aromantic Friendship Survey: The person performing the survey themselves appears concerned about the age demographic.
Aspec PDA Survey: This is specific to "LGBT+ spaces" which could introduce several, indirect, biases. There's nothing in the results to separate the views of aros and allos.
Survey on Romantic Attraction: In terms of demographics of sexual orientation and gender this seems very skewed.
The Aromantic Spectrum in the Ace Community Survey: This is specifically biased towards asexuals, though did pick up a small proportion of allosexuals. There looks to be some good analysis within those limitations.
Romance and Sex Repulsion in the Aro-Spec Community Survey: Results: There's a breakdown by romantic orientation, but not by sexual orientation. There seems little attempt to correlate repulsion with orientation. Or to compare repulsion between the situations of romantic sex, romance free sex or sex free romance.
Romantic Ambivalence: This is about about identity labels. Specifically for people such as quoiromantics who may not fit "cleanly" into an "aromantic spectrum".
How Many People Are Aromantic?: This is specifically biased towards asexuals. With it being specifically noted that any allosexuals involved are unrepresentative. They conclude that aros are quite common. At one in every twenty three people more common than many recognised minority groups, including any of LGBTQ+.

[TripleA]

3 hours ago, Mark said:

Whilst it's good that you have been able to compile this list I can see some issues:
This is a very short list. Only nine items.
None of these are professional or academic research. Which means they are not citable for Wikipedia (or similar).
 
Going through them:
Aromantic Gender Experiences: The survey demographics seems very skewed. With cis people, especially men, underrepresented. 
Allosexual Aromantic Survey Results: There's a specific bias of only including allosexual people. Again the demographics seem skewed. Both in terms of gender and sexual orientation.
Aromantic Friendship Survey: The person performing the survey themselves appears concerned about the age demographic.
Aspec PDA Survey: This is specific to "LGBT+ spaces" which could introduce several, indirect, biases. There's nothing in the results to separate the views of aros and allos.
Survey on Romantic Attraction: In terms of demographics of sexual orientation and gender this seems very skewed.
The Aromantic Spectrum in the Ace Community Survey: This is specifically biased towards asexuals, though did pick up a small proportion of allosexuals. There looks to be some good analysis within those limitations.
Romance and Sex Repulsion in the Aro-Spec Community Survey: Results: There's a breakdown by romantic orientation, but not by sexual orientation. There seems little attempt to correlate repulsion with orientation. Or to compare repulsion between the situations of romantic sex, romance free sex or sex free romance.
Romantic Ambivalence: This is about about identity labels. Specifically for people such as quoiromantics who may not fit "cleanly" into an "aromantic spectrum".
How Many People Are Aromantic?: This is specifically biased towards asexuals. With it being specifically noted that any allosexuals involved are unrepresentative. They conclude that aros are quite common. At one in every twenty three people more common than many recognised minority groups, including any of LGBTQ+.

Well I never said it was finished, and there's not a lot of stuff on Aromanticism in the first place. I basically have to work with what I can find at the moment. Also, there are many sections/sheets/categories, which you can access by clicking on the headings that should show up top on mobile and along the bottom on PC, there are more than 9 things sourced there, same for the asexuality document. 

20 hours ago, aspecofstardust said:

I'm highlighting aspec related research and content on twitter for pride this month @aspec_stardust! We're only 5 days in but plenty more coming that I think you'll be interested in including. I'll have a round-up post on my blog (aspecofstardust.wordpress.com) at the end of the month too. I also have most if not all of the pdfs for the articles I mention so if there's a resource you'd like to have let me know and I can send it to you.

That sounds great

[Neir]

11 hours ago, Mark said:

There's a breakdown by romantic orientation, but not by sexual orientation. There seems little attempt to correlate repulsion with orientation. Or to compare repulsion between the situations of romantic sex, romance free sex or sex free romance.

@Mark This was the research I conducted, so thanks for this comment! The distinctions between sex are actually really interesting - I wonder if we could capture those in a later survey (perhaps through the AUREA census in a couple of years when we re-open). 
As for repulsion x orientation, the numbers were not large enough to do a repulsion correlation with orientation that would in any way be useful or representative statistically.

 

@TripleA I highly recommend checking AUREA's Research tab here: https://www.aromanticism.org/en/research
Aromanticism is not a common topic of study academically but there are a few things there that are great (notably, a thesis by C. Lang in 2018). There are also a couple of a-spec works. It's a growing list and I've heard buzzes of upcoming aro research in the future so it'll be interesting to see.

[sennkestra]

@aspecofstardust if you're interested in ace research content as well, I have a list of ace research resources that can be useful for finding ace content (including the giant asexual research bibliography, although unfortunately it's not 100% up to date and I can't fix that until my alma mater reopens their campus from coronavirus quarantines).

https://nextstepcake.wordpress.com/resources/asexual-research/

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of aromantic-focused research - probably the closest I can get is like, a couple of papers that compare aromantic to non-aromantic asexual participants (can't think of any formal papers off the top of my head that collected info on non-asexual aromantic participants; I think right now there's mostly only informal community based research).

Edited June 7, 2020 by sennkestra

[sennkestra]

---

Anyway, as far as formal research, the main works that I know of that look in more detail at aromanticism only does so in the context of asexuality:

Ace and Aro: Understanding Differences in Romantic Attractions Among Persons Identifying as Asexual (doesn't differentiate between romantic and aromantic non-asexuals in any of their analysis, but at least they explicitly point this out as a potential weakness of their research?)

Patterns of Asexuality in China: Sexual Activity, Sexual and Romantic Attraction, and Sexual Desire (has a few small items that compare aromantic to other romantic identities within asexual communities, but no examination of aromanticism outside ace communities)

There are also some more narrative/qualitative interview which feature asexual aromantic people discussing aromanticism and amatonormativity which I could try to dig up if people would be interested, but it's all heavily within the context of asexual-specific experiences.

(The ace community survey has talked a bit about aromanticism in both aces and non-aces as well, but it's still limited as a survey that mostly recruits in ace communities, and while it does have a little more credibility in research communities than other community surveys, it's still not as widely accepted as more traditional formally published papers)

 

[Mark]

On 6/7/2020 at 12:42 AM, Neir said:

@Mark This was the research I conducted, so thanks for this comment! The distinctions between sex are actually really interesting - I wonder if we could capture those in a later survey (perhaps through the AUREA census in a couple of years when we re-open). 
As for repulsion x orientation, the numbers were not large enough to do a repulsion correlation with orientation that would in any way be useful or representative statistically.

Reading the whole thing I note that you said 

Quote

I did, at one point, had a question asking whether or not respondents were on the ace-spectrum, and the vast majority of respondents were. I retracted this question at +- 300 respondents, meaning that I can probably conclude that even with the final numbers, allosexual aros are probably underrepresented in this survey.

Which means you probably should have split the analysis into both "version A" and "version B" sections.
It is, however, impressive to get 527 responses.
 

19 hours ago, sennkestra said:

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of aromantic-focused research - probably the closest I can get is like, a couple of papers that compare aromantic to non-aromantic asexual participants (can't think of any formal papers off the top of my head that collected info on non-asexual aromantic participants; I think right now there's mostly only informal community based research).

Regardless of intent this perpetuates the myth of aro being a subset of ace,

About the only one which comes remotely close to having any any allosexual aromantics involved is Stucki's "Compulsory Sexuality and Amatonormativity in Higher Education: A Photovoice Study with Asexual and Aromantic Students."
Where one of the subjects identifies as "Asexual, but questioning Aromantic"

I notice things like there is a "Pathologizing Asexuality" section, but not "Pathologizing Aromanticism"
There's "Asexual Identity Disclosure and Discrimination", but not "Aromantic Identity Disclosure and Discrimination". Which starts "Several researchers have looked at the coming out process for asexual and aromantic people..." (In several places where the heading says "asexual" the text says "asexual and aromantic". It's easier to find examples where "asexual" is used on it's own than where "aromantic" is.too.)
"Sexual Coercion" is mentioned, but not "Romantic Coercion".

[Neir]

Oh, oops! I apologize, @Mark, I had totally misread the title of that survey - it was not, in fact, the one I conducted. (I looked at that number and thought, "That's not quite right..." and then did quite the impressive facepalm. No more forum-treading in the early hours of the morning for me.) I still think the comments you had are useful and applicable to the one I did run though (which was the aro-spec identities and experiences of stigmatization survey a while back).

[sennkestra]

10 hours ago, Mark said:

About the only one which comes remotely close to having any any allosexual aromantics involved is Stucki's "Compulsory Sexuality and Amatonormativity in Higher Education: A Photovoice Study with Asexual and Aromantic Students."
Where one of the subjects identifies as "Asexual, but questioning Aromantic"

Sorry, was there a typo here? I'm not clear on how an asexual person who was questioning their aromanticism is at all close to an allosexual aromantic...

I was actually looking into that article based on the title but as far as I can tell the only aromantic people in that participant pool were asexual  - although I admittedly only skimmed it. Did I miss something there?

[Mark]

On 6/9/2020 at 6:14 AM, sennkestra said:

Sorry, was there a typo here? I'm not clear on how an asexual person who was questioning their aromanticism is at all close to an allosexual aromantic..

There's a possibility that they could be greysexual or demisexual. Thus have, limited, ability to experience sexual attraction.
Though they are also the aromantic in the study.
Page 61 (76) of the thesis.