Analysis of Roller Derby Gender and Relationship Study 2015 (Preliminary)

This post has been a LONG time coming...

If you need to catch up on the history of this study you can find it here: http://bourbonandbrains.blogspot.com/2015/02/roller-derby-relationship-and-gender.html

Let's jump right into the results!

One of the big questions I wanted to answer was whether or not roller derby increases likelihood of divorce or infidelity? The other question is seemingly a lot more ridiculous but remains a roller derby myth up until this day; Does roller derby "turn people gay"? (I HATE that misconception). I'm a data guy so I needed numbers to back up my claims.  Thusly, the survey went out in its last iteration.

Let's answer those questions, but first let's look at our demographics.

Now if we look at divorce rates for skaters we find that based on age brackets roller derby divorce rates are almost precisely the same as the national averages for the United States of America (where approximately 50% of all respondents reside). It appears that age, more than roller derby involvement, is the factor in the divorce rate of derby skaters.

Further proof of marriage being fairly stable when it comes to derby is this chart showing that of those who come into roller derby married almost 80% are still married, you can adjust the Starting vs Current Status to see the "Flow" of where skaters go relationship wise.

Subsequently, if you want to look at the "Categories" of who people date in derby you'll see slightly lower numbers in this survey as far as people pre-derby with a non-derby affiliation compared to the married graph listed previously. This would mean that it's very likely that some of these significant others have subsequently become involved in roller derby due to their spouses' involvement. Play around with that graph and compare to the above one below!

The next big question is if derby influences sexual preference?

While there is a slight increase over time in interest in expanded sexual horizons past heteronormative relationships this can, I believe, be accounted for with the fact that there is a VERY high percentage of LGBT athletes participating in the sport. To put it in numbers, compared to estimates for United States populations just a few years ago it's 10-12x what we would find reported as a national average. I think it's this exposure to a high rate of LGBT experiences which might account for some of the results that were seen.

Unfortunately I cannot find (currently) any studies that look at the rise of LGBT self-identification over time to compare to this study. Therefore, a direct comparison for these numbers cannot be made to the general populace at large in the same way as a one-shot self LGBT identification can with national studies.

So, while I cannot point definitely to the fact that derby is not a factor in changes of sexual desires I can say with certainty that the high LGBT inclusion rate does expose people who may have otherwise not been exposed to LGBT culture.

That said the VAST majority of people who came in to roller derby tend to be people who are involved with someone external to roller derby. This holds true for both people who are and are not in the same relationship as when they started becoming involved in roller derby. The chart below is one you can play with and see exactly who ends up with who. You can see specifically who ends up with who over the course of the average derby career.

Now for the interesting results!

One of the most surprising results that came out of the data is that younger skaters exhibited a greater growth in "comfort" in sexuality. Skaters in their late teens or early 20s, particularly, showed significantly higher comfort levels across the board, with generally all skaters involved in derby showing an increase in comfort regardless of age. Given the high rate of LGBT suicide and suicide attempts this may point to roller derby as one of the most inclusive and positive contact sports LGBT sports youth can participate in. Inclusion and acceptance in the culture of derby may literally be a lifesaver for young LGBT youth. From a purely personal perspective I can tell you as a junior roller derby coach I had a skater come out to me before they came out to their parents. With the large amount of LGBT individuals involved in roller derby the sheer likelihood of getting an understanding coach or themselves an LGBT individual is astronomically higher.

Here is the chart showing the rate of change in comfort by age (orage is pre-derby, green is current):

Below you can see the chart on increases in comfort of sexuality. I removed "5" as a start because almost 50% of people started and ended with a "5" in comfort so I just wanted to see how much and what percentages the increases were as an aggregate:

I'm still working on an academic paper to submit to some journals regarding this research (if you have suggestions those of you from academia I'd love to hear them!). In the meantime I'll likely parse out posts about further results findings throughout this blog (which I'll add links to the end of this post as they come online).

The other big thing I can announce is the next iteration of the survey. I won't go into a ton of detail but I've decided to attempt to make it longitudinal based on people who requested to be contacted with results of this survey's analysis. If you chose to be contacted with results last time (approximately 41% of you), please use the same email address as a contact point this year so I can link data year to year. If you didn't elect to be contacted previously but would like to be part of the longitudinal study please leave a note in the "Final Thoughts" field saying you'd like to be included and I'll try to match country / state / birthday / league type.

I encourage you to take/share out the new survey via this link: https://goo.gl/H6Sib3

As always if you have any questions or concerns please email me at inform8n@gmail.com or message me on Twitter @wjking0. Thanks again for reading and for continuing to help us all understand the impact Roller Derby has on lives both around the block and around the world!

P.S. I titled this "Preliminary" since it's prior to publishing a paper on the topic with more in depth analysis. I also tend to publish a little more on this topic as the time goes on, including a TL;DR version that I'll link to here eventually.

Roller Derby Relationship and Gender Study Questionnaire

What’s this article about?

I'm writing up a little brief to answer some FAQs regarding my newly-published Roller Derby Relationship and Gender Study (located here: http://goo.gl/yF3Qr9 ). I'm looking at the way time spent in roller derby changes who we are, who we date, how we see our bodies, our self identity and some other key factors.

Who am I?!

I'm a player/coach for the Men's Roller Derby of Kentucky team The Dark Horses and a coach of the Central Kentucky Junior Roller Derby team the Sixth Street Slammers as well as being a photographer for leagues all over the region and all over the world at several tournaments. In the real world though I do data analytics at the University of Kentucky.

The Story

The story is that this is actually v2.0 of a survey a friend of mine originally did who wanted to write an article about the results and asked for my help disseminating the original survey. I agreed to help her and she agreed to share the raw data with me to analyze once she closed the survey. The problem was she used free-form text entry on her survey which made it INCREDIBLY hard to classify/categorize!

Ex. “How long have you been involved in roller derby?”

“3 months”

“2.5 years”

“6 seasons”

“4”

You can see how this was problematic to analyze. My friend and original creator of the survey saw the terror she had wrought and decided that it wasn't worth sifting through to write an article about. Still, after about two weeks of working with the data I was able (literally after hand-coding around 600+ entries into categories) to get some analysis going. I couldn't deduce much but most of the findings were unsurprising. Most people do NOT change their gender preferences because of derby. What I DID notice in the original study though was that people that identified as anything other than "Straight" tended to 'come out' more while playing derby and reveal what they considered to be their 'true selves'. That made me VERY interested in expanding and refining the survey to make it much more nominal and more easy to analyze. I talked to my friend and she said it was my baby if I wanted it so I took it and have been refining it and trying to get it as inclusive as I could. I'm particularly interested in things regarding changes in gender identity/preference and the number of committed relationships people have and whom they have them with. Strangely enough in my early analysis of data from v2.0 survey I've found some interesting trends not related to gender and identity but just derby as a whole. Particularly that the average age of derby skaters seems to be (slightly) rising (see graph below).

What am I going to do with all of this data?!

One of the big questions people ask is 'how does this help the derby community?' My big goal though is to dispel rumors and preconceived notions with cold hard facts and analytics. One of the common jokes around leagues I'm around is that when someone's marriage falls apart that "the Derby Divorce Machine" strikes again. While funny I was also curious if the rate of divorce was higher among derby than the general populous and try to deduce why etc. As far as where I intend to publish the information I run a data visualization blog at http://bourbonandbrains.blogspot.com/ where I'll likely publish some visualizations that people will be able to manipulate themselves and play with to find their own little nuggets of truth. The second phase of analysis is that one of my dear friends in derby is also a professor here at the University of Kentucky in Social Work and she asked if I could include some of the questions about comfort level with body image and sexuality in there to give it some 'umph' research-wise. She and I are hoping to write at least one, if not more, academic papers out of this data to publish out in some sociology journals.

Who has access to these results?

Ultimately only 2 people have direct access to these results and they will not be shared in any public way with email addresses (if you chose to put those down) or any sort of identifiable information. I'll likely be stripping out birthday as well since I've already used it to calculate "Age" and "Original Age When Joining Derby" based on the two date fields.

Finally

I'm very VERY excited about the amount of data coming in now and I've been making notes for refinements and I'll likely put out another survey of similar nature in about a year or so (to keep the data fresh, discover new data, and answer new questions and fix the survey for those with issues answering in a way that suits their lifestyles). I would still like more international participation and participation from skaters 21 and younger (even down to 15-16) but that requires tapping into a demographic that uses things like instagram and snapchat where it's really hard to deliver a survey link! :-/ If anyone can think of a good way to get to this younger demographic I would LOVE to hear about it!

I'm more than happy to answer any questions or concerns anyone has so please send them my way via my email at inform8n@gmail.com or on twitter @wjking0 I want us to better understand ourselves as a derby culture and improve ourselves through self-knowledge.

Much derby <3,

Jack Flash

P.S. Any site is allowed to reproduce or publish this page as along as a link to this original article is included.