Participants Five Thousand Male Participants

Participants

Five thousand male participants will be recruited, using advertisements placed strategically on social media networks. None of the social media networks on which the advertisements are placed will be pornographic in nature, to ensure that random selection takes place. Advertisements will announce that male participants between the ages of 18 and 40 are needed for an educational study, but the nature of the research will be withheld. Anonymity will be preserved, because the participants will be routed to a web portal that encrypts any and all data sent; as well as the IP addresses of the participants. The participants will therefore be randomly selected from around the world, to offer the greatest variety of data and making the study highly generalizable and externally as well as internally valid. Incentives for participation will include a discount at an online retailer.

b. Design

Because it will be impossible to evaluate the many intervening variables that lead men to engage in extra-marital affairs, a causal relationship cannot be explicitly inferred from the data gathered. Therefore, this study will be correlational in design, measuring the dependent variable (extra-marital affair) with the independent variable (pornography consumption). Operational definitions of these variables will be provided, as it is necessary to define what constitutes an extra marital affair and what constitutes pornographic consumption. The definition of extra-marital affair will be limited only to physical affairs as opposed to emotional affairs, which are more difficult to quantify. The definition of pornographic consumption will be measured in number of hours per week spent watching material from an age-restricted website.

c. Procedure

Participants will be recruited in the manner outlined in the section (a). Informed consent will be acquired as each participant fills out a form with his consent to the experiment, including consent to install a small anonymous tracking device that measures web usage much as Google does. Information regarding the tracking device will be provided. Data is collected entirely online, and anonymity is guaranteed, as no names or addresses are collected. Debriefing is offered. No deception is used, but the participants only know that pornography is an element of the research after they are presented with the survey.

d. Measures