On the Use of Control Variables in Pornography Effects Research: A Longitudinal Conceptual Replication

In Journal of Communication, Volume 72, Issue 3, pages 429– 447, we and two other colleagues published an article titled ‘To misspecify is common, to probe misspecification scientific: Common “confounds” in pornography research may actually be predictors’ (Wright et al., 2022). As the title suggests, the primary purpose of this article was to evaluate whether thirdvariables routinely conceptualized as potential confounds may be more accurately theorized as initiating predictors. We had recently suggested that many “control variables” in the pornography effects literature may actually be substantively involved in the pornography effects process (Wright, 2021). We pointed out that Bushman and Anderson (2021) had recently made a similar observation about the potential misspecification of substantive variables as controls in the media violence effects literature and noted similar concerns about the use of control variables from social scientists in other disciplines (e.g., Becker et al., 2016; Bernerth & Aguinis, 2016). Using demographic, pornographic, and sexual belief data from our National Survey of Porn Use, Relationships, and Sexual Socialization (NSPRSS), we found support for the predictive, rather than the confounding, role of demographic variables routinely included as controls in the pornography effects literature. Contrary to the confounding perspective, we found that the association between U.S. adults’ perceptions of pornography’s realism and erroneous sexual beliefs maintained after age, education, race, sex, and marital status were included as statistical controls. Consistent with the prediction perspective, path modeling and indirect effect results suggested that these demographic variables predicted perceived pornography realism, which in turn predicted erroneous sexual beliefs. Theoretically, we discussed how the notion that demographic variables affect pornography use and response, which in turn affect users’ sexual cognitions, is consistent with Slater’s (2015) Reinforcing Spirals Model (RSM), Valkenburg and Peter’s (2013) Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model (DSMM), and our (Wright, 2011) Sexual Script Acquisition, Activation, Application Model (3AM). But we also pointed out how the cross-sectional nature of the NSPRSS posed a potential threat to inference. Specifically, while our results strongly implied a particular temporal sequencing (we compared competing path models), we were unable to test chronology directly given that the NSPRSS data were gathered at one point in time. We recently became aware that the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded General Social Survey (GSS) had unexpectedly gathered another round of nationally representative panel data (Davern et al., 2020). After providing funding for several panel surveys in the earlier 2000s, NSF’s contributions to this element of the GSS ceased, as did any further panel studies. However, due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the early months of 2020, GSS staff redesigned the 2020 GSS in several ways to protect the health and wellbeing of participants and interviewers (Davern et al., 2020). One of these changes involved a primarily web administered re-interview of participants in the 2018 GSS (i.e., T1 2018, T2 2020). Thus, the COVID-19 pandemic led to an unexpected addition to the previous (but heretofore defunct) GSS panels. As detailed subsequently, these new GSS panel data allowed for a prospective conceptual replication of the cross-sectional analyses we conducted for Wright et al. (2022). We pen this commentary in late July of 2022, just a few weeks after The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade via Dobbs v. Jackson. It goes without saying that this decision will reignite social science research on factors predictive of public opinion about abortion rights. In previous GSS panels, we found evidence that earlier pornography use predicted both inter (between-person) and intra (within-person) increases in support for abortion rights over time through increases in sexual liberalism (i.e., acceptance and nonjudgment of others’ sexual and reproductive behavior) (Tokunaga et al., 2015; Wright & Tokunaga, 2018). Although we were the first to demonstrate these linkages collectively using panel data (i.e., pornography → sexual liberalism → support for abortion rights), pornography’s correlation with sexual liberalism (link one) and sexual liberalism’s correlation with support for abortion rights (link two) were hardly novel ideas and already demonstrated in the literature (Bahr & Marcos, 2003; Strickler & Danigelis, 2002; Wright et al., 2013; Wright, 2013). Given the current (and extraordinarily well-deserved) focus on abortion rights and public opinion about abortion in the U.S., we decided to use support for abortion rights as the attitudinal object within which to explore whether our crosssectional NSPRSS findings from U.S. adults replicated when using longitudinal panel data from the GSS. Specifically, using