2018/04/14 by Tyler Burleigh, Alicia N. Rubel · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Psychology · Medicine · Mathematics · #Marriage and Sexual Relationships #LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy #Marriage and Family Dynamics #Sample (material) #Weighting #Population #Demography #Identity (music) #Point (geometry) #Statistics #Medicine #Sociology #Mathematics #Philosophy #Physics #Radiology
paper · doi:10.31234/osf.io/st2k5
openalex publication_date 2018/04/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
Despite a growing interest in polyamory, it is unknown how many polyamorists there are in the general population. In acknowledging that the meaning of ‘polyamory’ is contested (e.g., Klesse, 2014), we estimated the prevalence of polyamory when it was defined as: 1) an identity, 2) relationship beliefs/preferences, 3) relationship status, and 4) relationship agreements. We recruited 972 individuals from Mechanical Turk and used a sample weighting procedure to approximate a representative sample of the United States population. Point prevalence estimates ranged from about 0.6% to 5%, and lifetime estimates ranged from about 2% to 23%. Thus, we estimate that there are at least 1.44 million adults in the US who count as polyamorous.