Swearing survey - some results! [A thread].
In March 2020, I launched an online survey looking at the offensiveness of certain words. I've posted a more detailed version of this thread here: swearing.info.
In March 2020, I launched an online survey looking at the offensiveness of certain words. I've posted a more detailed version of this thread here: swearing.info.
The survey was very simple. Participants were shown 11 isolated words, and asked to rate each of them on a scale of offensiveness with the prompt: ‘How offensive do you find each word?’. They used a slider, with a scale of 0-10 to give each word a rating.
The survey ran for a week, and had 2788 complete responses. The age range and gender mix looked like this, and the top 6 nationalities were these:
This boxplot shows the interquartile range (the middle 50%) of the ratings for each word, ordered from least to most offensive. Every grey dot is a response, so you can see the range of views for all the words. However, there is a clear pattern.
I measured the mean offensiveness score for each word as reported by men and women. The two groups seemed to view the words in very similar ways, although women had a slightly higher average offensiveness score overall.
These charts show a) the mean offensiveness score of each word as rated by respondents from the UK, the USA and Australia; and b) the same but with respondents from the four regions of the UK.
There were some differences in the overall ordering of the words in terms of offensiveness between nationalities. This shows the word order by participants from the 5 most represented nationalities.
This chart looks at UK respondents only. It takes the 7 most offensive words, and looks at the relevance of age. There is a very clear pattern, especially with regard to older participants (although look at bastard).
Respondents were also asked to choose the most offensive words from the list (up to 3), by dragging the words into a box. There was a great deal of consistency here:
There are obvious limitations to this small study. I've written about them in more detail here: swearing.info. But in summary, yes, I know that 'offensiveness' depends on context, and yes, I believe you when you say that you find none of the words offensive.
This is not a PhD, it's just a potentially interesting little survey. The results only relate to the participants themselves, not to the wider population, but they show some nice patterns which are perhaps worthy of further investigation.
If you took part - thanks! It's been fun to work on. I hope it might also be of interest/use to other people (maybe A-Level English Language students?). If you have any questions, please just ask.
Sorry, mistake in that image. Correction:
