Like everyone else, my free time is limited so I did not collect and analyze everything I possibly could have. Therefore, I want to acknowledge the following before sharing results in my next post…
Delimitations (intentional boundaries to narrow the scope of research):
1) The data I collected only includes 20 major cities in the United States.
2) I only collected data from accounts that have been active within the past 30 days (as of May 28, 2024). I chose this period because many steaming services and social media websites report “monthly users.”
Limitations (weaknesses in the data collection / analysis):
1) I did not have visibility to accounts that have been banned, muted, or who may have blocked me.
2) Some accounts may have been double counted because each account can list up to 2 locations.
3) Searches by gender were problematic as there are 22 genders from which to choose and every member can choose up to 5 genders in their profile which means there are 35,442 possible combinations of gender (yes, that is a real calculation).
To simplify the data collection, I only used 3 categories. The first category includes all profiles which include either “Man” or “Cis Man”. The second category includes all profiles which include either “Woman” or “Cis Woman”. The 3rd category, which I simply called “Other”, includes all profiles which do not include any of the terms in the first 2 categories. This was not meant as any disrespect, it was just a necessity to simplify data collection and analysis. I have already completed one dissertation and I did not want to turn this project into a second one.
Methodology:
As of 2023, the 22 largest cities in the United States are home to 35,412,450 people. I removed the cities of Dallas and San Jose from that list because they are within 50 miles of Fort Worth and San Francisco which are also on the list of the 22 largest cities. I then looked up the population of people who live within 50 miles of each of the remaining 20 cities. The combined population is 118,800,736 which is 34.9% of the total population of the United States. I then looked up data on CC members who live within 50 miles of those 20 cities and will share what I found in my next post.