A recent online survey has reached conclusions bound to stir patriotism in every citizen of Ukraine: Ukrainians are the sexiest nationality on earth.
That’s what Big 7 Travel concluded after polling readers to create a list of the 50 sexiest nationalities — and their survey has become a hot topic in both Ukrainian and foreign media.
Big 7 Travel described Ukrainians as having a “striking appearance” and said they “easily topped our poll for 2019.”
After Ukrainians, the Danes and Filipinos won second and third place, respectively. The Irish took the last spot. Many other nationalities were not included on the list.
But the survey raises a big question: what does it actually tell us? Sociologists say: nothing.
Behind the claims
Big 7 Travel is a media outlet that writes about travel, food and hotels for millennials. It focuses on a mobile-first, travel-obsessed audience that actively uses Instagram. It also has nearly 400,000 followers on Facebook.
The Dubai-based agency creates ratings of the most instagrammable spots in various countries, publishes the best hotel of the day, and creates restaurant and bar guides. Its content is often cited in Vogue, the Independent, the Daily Mail and Business Insider.
According to BBC Ukraine, the sexiness survey was sent by email and Instagram to 12,000 of the agency’s active followers from 50 countries. The results of the survey were based upon 8,500 responses, mainly from English-speaking countries like the United States, Australia and Great Britain. There were also respondents from Eastern Europe, including Russia and Ukraine.
Respondents were asked to estimate the sexiness of each nationality on a scale of 1 to 10. However, Big 7 Travel did not offer a definition of “sexy,” so it was up to respondents to interpret its meaning.
When the agency published its results, it included names and, sometimes, photos of celebrities from the countries in question. It is unclear whether survey respondents were given the celebrity names and photos in the survey, something that would indicate they might actually be voting for most attractive celebrity, not nationality.
Not sociology
If you thought that Big 7 Travel’s survey was an objective measure of global sexiness, media researcher and former Kyiv Post staff writer Daria Orlova has more bad news for you: it’s not.
The poll cannot be considered representative because it bases its conclusions on the responses of its particular audience, said Orlova, who is a senior lecturer at the Mohyla School of Journalism in Kyiv.
“We don’t know much about the audience in general: which nations are represented there and to what extent, what is the gender breakdown (of respondents)?” she told the Kyiv Post. “Likewise, we don’t know who got into the sample. Most of the headlines citing the ‘survey findings’ are sensationalist, to put it mildly.”
Orlova also believes that Big 7 Travel produces stories about top things and best places in order to attract a large audience, often at the expense of the quality of its results.
“I would be curious to learn how users of a travel website rank nations in terms of attractiveness, but there’s hardly anything more than that,” she says. “It is not a study in sociological terms.”
But that hasn’t stopped Ukrainian media from sharing the survey’s results — and inadvertently confirming Orlova’s opinion that the poll is aimed at attracting a large audience.
Ukraine also took 15th place in Big 7 Travel’s list “The top 50 sexiest accents in the world.”
