Kinsey Reporter wants to know about your Valentine's Day

Indiana University scientists who produce the Kinsey Reporter -- a global sex survey using smartphones -- want to know about your Valentine's Day. The scientists said a survey concerning Valentine's Day is available after downloading a free app from the Apple iOS Store or Google Play for Android, which includes basic and broad questions such as "What does one's heart most desire for Valentine's Day?" and "What happened on Valentine's Day?" It also gives visitors the opportunity to provide more details about sexual activities, from the desired to the experienced, during Cupid's holiday. "Ideally, we'd like to compare this new data between Valentine's Day and the other reports we get throughout the year," Stephanie Sanders, interim director of The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, said in a statement. Researchers with the institute and the university's Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing worked together to develop the app. The Kinsey Reporter allows citizen observers around the world to report on sexual behavior and experiences, and then share, explore and visualize what people report. Data submitted by anonymous citizen scientists is also used for research and shared with the public at the Kinsey Reporter website, Sanders said. The researchers would like smartphone users everywhere to contribute observed information on sexual activity, public displays of affection, flirting, even unwanted experiences. The aggregated data can be presented by geographic region via interactive maps, timelines and charts, the researchers said. "We are getting thousands of reports from around the world -- from at least 45 countries so far -- but the great majority have been from the U.S.," said Filippo Menczer, director of IU's Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research and a School of Informatics and Computing professor who helped design the app. "And as we'd hoped, we are beginning to observe some interesting patterns in the data."