In this research on asexuality, we will use the categories of asexual identification, desire
and behavior. Strictly speaking, identification is a straightforward question. Were persons to self-
identify themselves as asexuals, they would be so identified in the research as asexuals. This
does not mean that they necessarily respond positively to questions dealing with other aspects of
asexuality. Indeed a person could self-identify as asexual, but not state that sexual activity is not
desirable. Alternately, the lack of sexual desire is a variable that is not as straightforward as
personal identification in the construction of an asexual category. Desire has to do with the
feelings and individual wants regardless of behavior or identification. If a respondent were to
declare not wanting to have sexual relations with someone of either sex, he or she would be
defined as asexual according to this dimension of asexuality.
Like desire, behavior is only one aspect of a constructed view of asexuality. A person
may not engage in sexual behavior but may not consider himself or herself as asexual in the
binary sense. Therefore not engaging in sexual behavior is considered as another aspect of a
constructed view of asexuality. A negative response about whether a respondent had sexual
relations would reflect a positive categorization on the behavioral aspect of constructed
asexuality.
The 2002 NSFG instrument includes a question enabling us to directly assess the
behavioral dimension of asexuality. But unfortunately, it does not include questions that permit us
to precisely identify the self-identification and desire dimensions of asexuality. But there are
proxy responses to NSFG questions that will allow us to approximate such dimensions. We
discuss these issues in more detail later in a section focusing on the 2002 National Survey of
Family Growth. We turn now to a review of the limited literature on asexuality.
A Nationally Representative Study of Asexuality in Great Britain
With but one exception, the extant social science literature on asexuality is comprised of
studies based on convenience samples and other samples not statistically representative of the
larger populations from which they were drawn. (In the larger paper we review these studies in
more detail.)
The only analysis of asexuality based on data from a nationally representative sample
survey of 18,000 British residents undertaken in the early 1990s by Johnson and colleagues
(1994) and analyzed later by Bogaert (2004). Johnson and associates used household probability
sampling to gather data on 18,876 respondents in England, Wales, and Scotland between the ages
of 16 and 59. The survey had an overall response rate of 71.5 percent. In the analysis of these
data reported by Bogaert, 195 of the 18,876 respondents were dropped “because the interviewers
reported that these individuals had ‘severe’ language, literacy, or other problems during the
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Convention