Furry Survey
From WikiFur, the furry encyclopedia.
- The Furvey is a personal, detailed questionnaire that originated on alt.lifestyle.furry
The Furry Survey, developed by Alex Osaki, is intended to compile information about people in the furry fandom. It is a 27-question web-based poll gathering information on geographic location, sexual orientation, and other common demographic issues. As of May 27, 2008, it had roughly 3555 respondents.
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[edit] History
An initial version of the survey was compiled in late 2003 and posted to various Usenet groups and furry message boards. The current version, slightly rewritten in August 2007, has been running since April 4, 2005 and does not include data from the initial survey.
The stated goal of the survey is both "to improve the public perception of the fandom by providing a database of objective information" and, more objectively, to gather "primary-source data... critical to the understanding of any sociological demographic".
[edit] Summary
Please note that the survey is ongoing and continues to update. Unless otherwise noted, results quoted in this article are as of 6 September 2007.
In general, the results of the survey mesh with existing data, including that of the University of California, Davis campus. The survey reports that 80.7% of respondents were male, 82.7% self-identified as "Caucasian, non-Hispanic", and 72.4% reported their location as the United States (10.7% reported their location as Canada).
[edit] General Demographics
The survey indicates a comparatively young fandom, with nearly half (47%) of respondents reporting their age as between 15 and 19; the average age of 21 years is slightly younger than the UC-Davis indicated figure of 24.6 years. Correspondingly, more than 70% of respondents said they had considered themselves a furry for between 0 and 5 years; 2.8% said they had done so for less than 1.
The education level is roughly what one would expect from the age distributions. The percentage of respondents aged 25 or higher reporting a college degree, at 31%, is higher than the 28.4% reported by the US Census Bureau by a statistically meaningless amount.
Furries tended to report that they shied away from mainstream religions; less than a quarter reported adhering to a Christian belief system; there were only three Jews, one Muslim, and no Hindus or Buddhists. 10.1% reported their religion as "pagan"; the most popular answer, "other" (25.4%), includes a wide variety of people adhering to systems of their own design. 40% were agnostic or atheist.
[edit] Furry Issues
[edit] Self Identity
68.6% of respondents identified "strongly" or "extremely strongly" as human. 11.3%, asked to respond to the statement "I am predominantly human", said that they did not consider themselves human at all.
[edit] Sexual Orientation
Among respondents listing an orientation, 42.3% described themselves as heterosexual, 17.1% as homosexual, and 35.9% as bisexual. These numbers mesh to some degree with those reported by the University of California (32.7% heterosexual, 25.5% homosexual, 37.3% bisexual); however, the percentage identifying as heterosexual or homosexual differs by a statistically-significant degree in both cases. No explanation is offered for this difference.
[edit] Sexual Activity
Perhaps one of the more intriguing aspects comes from a series of questions asking respondents to describe how important they considered sex to be for their furry lives, as well as for the furry lives of others. A third question asked respondents to comment on the perception of the importance of sex by the public at large.
While nearly all (94.6%) answered that the public assumed sex played a "large" or "extremely large" role in the furry fandom, only 18% of respondents answered similarly for themselves. The distribution is strongly skewed towards a minimising of the importance of sex; more than half (50.4%) said it played a "small" or "extremely small" role.
However, they were more agnostic about their fellow furries. Well over half (57.4%) believed it was of "medium" importance to other furries; more than a quarter answered that they believed it was important to a "large" or "extremely large" degree. While 29.2% of respondents said sex played a "small" role to them, only 12.2% said they believed it played a small role for others. More drastically, while one-fifth of respondents (20.7%) said sex had an "extremely small" degree of significance to their furry lives, only 1.7% believed it played an extremely small role in the lives of other furries.
[edit] Zoophilia
15.7% of respondents self-identified as zoophiles, an amount which may or may not be different in a statistical sense from the general population (Alvarez and Freinhar's control groups reported a 10% and 15% prevalence respectively). No questions were asked as to the degree of activity, if any.
Respondents were agnostic leaning negative towards zoophiles. Of users reporting an opinion, a plurality (28.8%) described themselves as ambivalent, with 20% reporting positive feelings and around 40% reporting negative ones. If the answer is limited to non-zoophiles, the number reporting "negative" or "extremely negative" feelings increases to 54%, with "extremely negative", while remaining the second most common answer, increasing to a third of all respondents.
[edit] Activities Within the Fandom
A portion of the survey is dedicated to exploring what people consider to be important within the fandom. Respondents consistently reported creative activity; 48.8% described themselves as artists and 49.6% as authors. Correspondingly, 86% described graphic art as "important" or "extremely important"; 71.2% said the same about writing.
Besting both of these, 93% of respondents said that online communities were "important" or "extremely important", with 80.7% choosing the latter option--perhaps unsurprisingly given that the survey was administered online. Music was much less popular; only 21.8% of respondents described it as "important" or "extremely important"; 35.4% described it as "unimportant" or "extremely unimportant".
Although only a tenth of furries (11.7%) described themselves as a regular attendee of conventions, more than half (56.4%) identified conventions as being "important" or "extremely important"; only 4% of respondents believed them to be unimportant or extremely unimportant.
[edit] Miscellaneous
The data from the survey matches closely with that from the University of California in suggesting that ~82% of furries are not themselves fursuiters. On the whole, furries display a strong commonality of interests; 77.8% described themselves as being fans of science-fiction; 75.4% said they were fans of science and technology or computers. 58.1% described themselves as fans of anime; 54.8% as fans of role-playing games.
