After doing cluster analysis — where participants are, true to the term, clustered into groups — the researchers found some interesting breakdowns. A full 75 percent of participants fell under the recreational grouping, with low scores on all porn use dimensions, an average of 24 minutes of viewing per week. Women and people in relationships were overrepresented in this group.
The “highly distressed non-compulsive” profile (12.7 percent of the sample) had low compulsivity and intensity scores, but lots of emotional distress, and watched for an average of 17 minutes a week. The “compulsive” profile fit 11.8 percent of participants, marked by high scores on intensity and compulsivity, and moderate scores on distress. They averaged 110 minutes a week.
In an interview with PsyPost, Vaillancourt-Morel said that the main message of the study is that porn users are “a heterogeneous population in which distinct subgroups experience quite different sexual outcomes”: Porn creates problems for two groups of people, but for the majority, there were no negative sexual outcomes.
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