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Counting polyamorists who count: Prevalence and definitions of an under-researched form of consensual nonmonogamy

Online Research
Demographics
Sexuality
Consensual Non-Monogamy

Burleigh, T., & Rubel, A. (2018). Counting polyamorists who count: Prevalence and definitions of an under-researched form of consensual nonmonogamy. doi: 10.1177/1363460718779781

Authors

Alicia Rubel

Tyler Burleigh

Published

November 2018

Doi

10.1177/1363460718779781

Abstract

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 population of the USA. 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 USA who count as polyamorous.

Important figure

Figure 1. Interest in polyamory has been increasing over time, as measured by records in Google Ngram database with “polyamory” keyword (top) and records in the Web of Science database with “polyamory” or “polyamorous” keywords (bottom).