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I believe many such studies regarding pedophilia may be flawed because they rely on declarations from MAPs about what age they are attracted to. Admittedly, there is no reliable way to directly measure the attraction (I don't think any measure of physical arousal is truly accurate), but it's no reason to dismiss the bias introduced by a declarative method. It is in the nature of language itself to categorize, mostly in a binary mode. Am I a pedophile or not? Our mind is designed to search for a clear answer to such questions, even if in reality all the lines are blurred. Even if the questionnaire is asking about the attraction in a pseudo-continuous mode (age), it does not remove the previous bias that most people have already identified themselves by using categories. So the ages they will declare as attractive to them are likely to be skewed by their previous self-identification. A few years ago, a young doctorate came here and shared his publication. He was proud to have "discovered" that they were not two, but three poles around which the sexual attractions revolved regarding age. His statistics skills were excellent I believe, but his faculty of interpretation may regretfully not have been to the same level. He failed to catch one obvious issue regarding his finding: his study may have little to do with the sexual attraction per se, and much to do with modern language. He is, I believe, very likely to have just discovered that modern societies distinguish people between children, teens and adults, and accordingly people define their attraction as towards children, teens or adults. Contrary to the popular saying, statistics don't exactly lie, but they talk in riddles, so that they fool the unwise who think they can decipher their true meaning... Note: it would require a thorough verification of all the studies considered in this meta-analysis, but I believe the "psychopathologies" with a greater ratio of dimensional results may be the ones where the bias cited above is less important. For example, when answering an autism questionnaire, it is likely less obvious to most people how the answers are positively or negatively related to an autism diagnostic, compared to questions regarding age of attraction. |