Kinsey Reports

thumb|The 1948 first edition of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, the first of the two Kinsey Reports

The Kinsey Reports are two scholarly books on human sexual behavior, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), written by Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, Clyde Martin, and (for Sexual Behavior in the Human Female) Paul Gebhard and published by W.B. Saunders. Kinsey was a zoologist at Indiana University and the founder of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction (more widely known as the Kinsey Institute). Jean Brown, Cornelia Christenson, Dorothy Collins, Hedwig Leser, and Eleanor Roehr were all acknowledged as research assistants on the book's title page. Alice Field was a sex researcher, criminologist, and social scientist in New York; as a research associate for Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, she provided assistance with legal questions.

The sociological data underlying the analysis and conclusions found in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was collected from approximately 5,300 men over a fifteen-year period. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female was based on personal interviews with approximately 6,000 women. In the latter, Kinsey analyzed data for the frequency with which women participate in various types of sexual activity and looked at how factors such as age, social-economic status, and religious adherence influence sexual behavior.

The two best-selling books were immediately controversial, both within the scientific community and the general public, because they challenged conventional beliefs about sexuality and discussed subjects that had previously been taboo. The validity of Kinsey's methods were sometimes called into question. Despite this, Kinsey's work is considered pioneering and some of the best-known sex research of all time.

Background and method

Surveys of sexual behavior were unprecedented in American society, although Clelia Duel Mosher had conducted a survey of Victorian women. Qualitative studies had been done by Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld, but these researchers did not attempt to gather quantitative data. Kinsey built up academic prestige over decades of study and gained the support of Rockefeller family-backed philanthropists for a large-scale analysis. His research was unprecedented in scale, involving 18,000 interviews.

Data was gathered primarily by means of subjective report interviews, conducted according to a structured questionnaire memorized by the experimenters (but not marked on the response sheet in any way). The response sheets were encoded in a way to maintain the confidentiality of the respondents, being entered on a blank grid using response symbols defined in advance. 11.6% of white males (ages 20–35) were given a rating of 3 (about equal heterosexual and homosexual experience/response) throughout their adult lives. The study also reported that 10% of American males surveyed were "more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55" (in the 5 to 6 range on the Kinsey scale).

7% of single females (ages 20–35) and 4% of previously married females (ages 20–35) were given a rating of 3 (about equal heterosexual and homosexual experience/response) on Kinsey Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale for this period of their lives. 2 to 6% of females, aged 20–35, were more or less exclusively homosexual in experience/response, and 1 to 3% of unmarried females aged 20–35 were exclusively homosexual in experience/response.

Kinsey scale

The Kinsey scale is used to measure a person's overall balance of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and takes into account both sexual experience and psychosexual reactions. The scale ranges from 0 to 6, with 0 being completely heterosexual and 6 completely homosexual. An additional category, X, was mentioned to describe those who had "no socio-sexual contacts or reactions," which has been cited by scholars to mean asexuality. The scale was first published in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) by Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy and others, and was also prominent in the complementary work Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Introducing the scale, Kinsey wrote:

The scale is as follows:

{|class="wikitable"

!Rating

!style="text-align: left"|Description

|- style="background-color: #ccccff"

| style="text-align: center"|0

|Exclusively heterosexual

|- style="background-color: #ccddff"

| style="text-align: center"|1

|Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual

|- style="background-color: #ccfffa"

| style="text-align: center"|2

|Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual

|- style="background-color: #ccffcc"

| style="text-align: center"|3

|Equally heterosexual and homosexual

|- style="background-color: #ccfffa"

| style="text-align: center"|4

|Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual

|- style="background-color: #ccddff"

| style="text-align: center"|5

|Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual

|- style="background-color: #ccccff"

| style="text-align: center"|6

|Exclusively homosexual

|- style="background-color: #fdfdfd"

| style="text-align: center"|X

|No socio-sexual contacts or reactions

Men: 11.6% of white males aged 20–35 were given a rating of 3 for this period of their lives.
Women: 7% of single females aged 20–35 and 4% of previously married females aged 20–35 were given a rating of 3 for this period of their lives. 2 to 6% of females, aged 20–35, were given a rating of 5 and 1 to 3% of unmarried females aged 20–35 were rated as 6.

Marital coitus

The average frequency of marital sex reported by women was 2.8 times a week in the late teens, 2.2 times a week by age 30, and 1.0 times a week by age 50. Kinsey estimated that approximately 50% of all married males had extramarital sex at some time during their married lives. Among the sample, 26% of females had extramarital sex by their forties. Between 1 in 6 and 1 in 10 females from age 26 to 50 were engaged in extramarital sex. However, Kinsey classified couples who have lived together for at least a year as "married", inflating the statistics for extra-marital sex.

Sadomasochism

12% of females and 22% of males reported having an erotic response to a sadomasochistic story.

Biting

Responses to being bitten:

Criticism

Kinsey's statistics in his Reports have been criticized both at the time he published and today. Although Kinsey sought to work on a more complete report involving 100,000 interviews and considered the initial 1948 publication to be a sample progress report, academics have criticized the sample selection and sample bias in the reports' methodology. The main issues cited by researchers are that Kinsey did not use random sampling procedures when collecting his data, that significant portions of his samples come from prison populations and male prostitutes, and that people who volunteer to be interviewed about taboo subjects are likely to create a self-selection bias. These issues would undermine the usefulness of the sample in terms of determining the tendencies of the overall population.

Statistics

In 1948, the same year as the original publication, a committee of the American Statistical Association, including notable statisticians such as John Tukey, condemned the sampling procedure. In a tense meeting with Kinsey, Tukey supposedly declared that even a sample as small as three to five, chosen randomly, would be preferable to hundreds in Kinsey's sample. In 1954, leading statisticians, including William Gemmell Cochran, Frederick Mosteller, John Tukey, and W. O. Jenkins issued for the American Statistical Association a critique of Kinsey's 1948 Male report, stating:

<blockquote>Critics are justified in their objections that many of the most interesting and provocative statements in the [Kinsey 1948] book are not based on the data presented therein, and it is not made clear to the reader on what evidence the statements are based. Further, the conclusions drawn from data presented in the book are often stated by KPM [Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin] in much too bold and confident a manner. Taken cumulatively, these objections amount to saying that much of the writing in the book falls below the level of good scientific writing.</blockquote>

In response, Paul Gebhard, Kinsey's close colleague, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" co-author, and successor as director of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, cleaned the Kinsey data of purported contaminants, removing, for example, all material derived from prison populations in the basic sample. (Gebhard had, while working with Kinsey, raised serious concerns about the use of prison populations especially, but had been shot down by Kinsey at the time.) In 1979, Gebhard (with Alan B. Johnson) published The Kinsey Data: Marginal Tabulations of the 1938–1963 Interviews Conducted by the Institute for Sex Research. Their conclusion, to Gebhard's surprise, was that none of Kinsey's original estimates were significantly affected by this bias: that is, the prison population and male prostitutes had the same statistical tendencies as the rest of the men Kinsey interviewed. The results were summarized by historian, playwright, and gay-rights activist Martin Duberman: "Instead of Kinsey's 37% (men who had at least one homosexual experience), Gebhard and Johnson came up with 36.4%; the 10% figure (men who were "more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55"), with prison inmates excluded, came to 9.9% for white, college-educated males and 12.7% for those with less education.

Kinsey himself was extremely frustrated by the criticisms of his sampling procedures, because he maintained that there was no way to do a successful study about sex using random probability sampling. As Kinsey biographer Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy points out, because of the sensitive nature of a sex study, contacting a truly random sample will garner a very high refusal rate—as modern sex studies using random sampling have shown.

The charge of an over-reliance on volunteers is also critiqued in the Gathorne-Hardy biography. All surveys rely on volunteers. Kinsey would ask the president or leader of the group to agree to an interview, and then that leader's influence would get him an initial batch of volunteers from the group, a second batch who did not want to be seen volunteering but would agree to be interviewed, and then a third batch brought in by, essentially, peer pressure. This may be explained in part by Kinsey's interview style, which focused on in-depth conversations with subjects carried out by himself or highly trained members of his team; they emphasized creating rapport with the interviewee and making them feel comfortable and secure. Modern interviewers tend to be less thoroughly trained and emphasize scientific detachment, which may make respondents less likely to share sensitive personal details. The Kinsey Institute denies this charge, though it acknowledges that men who have had sexual experiences with children were interviewed, with Kinsey balancing what he saw as the need for their anonymity to solicit "honest answers on such taboo subjects" against the likelihood that their crimes would continue.

Historian Peter Gay described Sexual Behavior in the Human Male as "methodologically far from persuasive".

Sociologist Edward Laumann stated that the Kinsey Reports were limited to the biology of sex and lacked psychological and clinical information and analysis and that this "meant that sex research did not move into the mainstream of academic credibility. People took their reputations in their hands if they attempted to pursue it." Laumann also acknowledged that "The Kinsey report was a cultural event of enormous consequence."

Context and significance

Only 5,000 copies of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male were initially printed in 1948, and its success surprised the publisher. The popular late-1948 Cole Porter song "Too Darn Hot" makes reference to it. Prior to the release of the second report in 1953, the first book had sold over 265,000 copies in the United States. Together, the Kinsey Reports sold three-quarters of a million copies, were translated into thirteen languages and may be considered as belonging to the most successful and influential scientific books of the 20th century. They were associated with a change in the public perception of sexuality, in conjunction with Masters and Johnson's texts about their 1960s investigations into the physiology of sex, breaking taboos and misapprehensions.