This is why we decided to examine what kinds of people look at and watch porn.
Since we had studied the GSS in class, we felt it would be useful to put what we had learned about to work. As we researched and examined the GSS, we found that there were a variety of different ways to examine the issues of pornography. We decided the best way to identify who looks at porn was to use people who had viewed a pornographic film within the last year. This variable is termed by the GSS as xmovie1. We used xmovie in the row role of all of our inquiries and was used as our main variable. The column role of our inquiries varied according to the factors we chose to examine: race, class, gender, strength of religion, total family income and happiness. The GSS terms these variables as race, class, sex, reliten, and happy. .
With our topic and statistical method chosen, it was time to form our hypotheses. It is common knowledge that porn as we know it is used predominantly by men. Therefore, our hypothesis on gender was that more males than females would have seen a pornographic film within the last year. Since pornography has negative societal connotations, we believed that the lower class, which also is considered to have negative societal connotations, would be more likely to have seen a pornographic film within the last year. We made a similar hypothesis in terms of religious affiliation. From a biblical perspective, sexual intercourse is exclusively reserved for marriage. Since pornography is usually pictorial of sexual intercourse out of wedlock, than people who view porn are likely to have less religious affiliation. In terms of race, since there are a more whites than blacks in America, it was our hypothesis that the majority of people to have watched a pornographic film within the last year would be white. It is known that people who are unhappy are likely to commit deviant acts and pornography is considered deviant, therefore, people who are unhappy are more likely to have seen a pornographic film within the last year.
