Talk:Kinsey Reports

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OMG his sample wasn't random!! --welcome to psychology

Seriously, why are these presented as valid criticisms? I think they would be better termed as caveats, caveats which apply to lots of psychological research besides Kinsey's. Does anyone really think it is possible to obtain a random sample on a sex survey? I do this kind of thing for a living and let me tell you, you are lucky to get 50% response rate on a 5 item survey on something like water quality. Kinsey's work was and is phenomenal and is as scientific as anything is in psychology, his results are hardly more "controversial" in the field than evolution is in biology.


"Kinsey's own sexual behavior has been subject of more scrutiny than that of perhaps any other researcher."

- why? I dunno.

---

Conservative groups were trying to find evidence of "abnormal" sexual behavior, to argue that his primary interest was promoting this kind of behavior in the mainstream. "He's a pervert, so he's trying to make us all perverts", the logic goes. Don't look at me - read Reisman's work for a good example of that kind of propaganda. This is NPOV though -- that his sexual behavior has been examined to a very large extent is a fact. -- user:Eloquence

I guess it's similar to the scrutiny that a religious reformer would get: if you criticize the sins of society, society will look for ways to shut you up by calling you a hypocrite. But an ad hominem attack doesn't affect the soundness of a person's reasoning (not in my eyes, anyway). --Ed Poor
Are you saying that since all psychology satisitics are so biase, any rubbish is good as any? I disagree. Sampling of voting intention, for example, can be verified after the polling day. So not all sampling have to be rubbish. It's an another example of political incorrectness gone wrong when a valid academic criticism is accused of right leaning bias. Kinsely opened himself up for accusation of bias because he did something which is obviously faulty from the ouset. Vapour

There's a difference though: Kinsey wasn't a hypocrite, those who scrutinized his sexual behavior appealed to societal prejudices. The religious fundamentalist who preaches the evils of sex and then winds up in bed with a prostitute is a hypocrite. That doesn't make him wrong (to claim so would indeed be ad hominem) but it may make him less trustworthy. -- user:Eloquence

Perhaps I didn't make my point clear. I agree that someone who preaches one thing and does another is a hypocrite, and I have found that calling someone a hypocrite is often an effective way of getting people to dismiss what he says. My analogy may have gone too far, because I meant that Kinsey's opponents may have been trying to discredit him ad hominem by trying to dig up dirt on him. If he had been shown to be gay or a pedophile, I surmise, his opponents would have exposed him hoping that his research would be dismissed as self-serving.
Anyway, I'm not so interested in Kinsey's character as I am in his research methods: does his research tell us anything about American sexual practices? --Ed Poor
The intent of the attacks on Kinsey may have been to smear him as a paedophile, but even once it was accepted that he was not, the suggestion that he had used data made available to him by paedophiles through their criminal acts left an issue congnate to that of the use of data from Nazi medical experiments. In practice, this juxtaposition exposed apparent hypocrisy on both sides of the divide. -- Alan Peakall 17:45 Nov 29, 2002 (UTC)
Kinsey was rarely attacked on personal grounds in his heyday. Great emphasis was placed on his extensive, boring research on gall wasps to reassure the public that this was no weirdo, but a serious scientist who, having exhausted gall wasps, had simply moved on to another species to study. It is only recently that it has come to light that the Kinsey coterie were swingers, that Kinsey encouraged his wife to participate (pimped her, you might say), that he was a masochistic bisexual who had had gradually gone from a 6 to a 1 or whatever his scale about sexual preferences was, that the "research" on orgasms in infants and children was performed by pedophiles, etc.etc.etc. This all appeared in a serious work of scholarship that was excerpted in The New Yorker, hardly a hotbed of rightwing propaganda. For some non-rightwing examples, check out this link to Clean Sheets Erotica Magazine or this survey from Knitting Circle: Gay and Lesbian Studies. It seems natural that righwingers too should be taking this point up. I believe he was a hypocrite, however important his scholarship may have been. Deal with it. It is disingenuous to pretend there was no connection between his behavior (which he kept secret) and his research. Ortolan88
I am sorry my phrasing above was misleading. I meant even were it accepted that he was not (a paedophile). I accept that it may be the case that he was (I am not disinclined to deal with it), but the hypocrisy that I was referring to on the pro-Kinsey side was that of those who protested that Kinsey was subject to smears of guilt by association while reserving to themselves the right to assert a progressive identity by expressing moral outrage at the use of data from Nazi medical experiments. -- Alan Peakall.
Most of the dung-flinging against Kinsey comes from one person, Judith Reisman, who also believes that there's a huge homosexual conspiracy to turn children gay -- see article. What the propaganda against Kinsey has in common is this: a lot of funding from Christian-fundamentalist sources. Kinsey made absolutely clear in his book that the data came from men who had illegal sexual relationships with children. Where else should he have gotten the data from? Had he himself observed chilren's sexual behavior, the allegations would be even more furious. Child sexuality is one of western society's biggest taboos, and anyone who dares to violate it must be punished, if posthumously. From this it becomes understandable that a child who experiences orgasm must obviously have been "tortured", as some detractors have claimed. A child experiences orgasm? Unthinkable! --Eloquence
An Ad Hominem abusive against Kinsey does nothing at all to discredit his research. Even if he did every horrible act he's charged with that still doesn’t do a thing to make his research invalid. After all even Josef Mengele's work, though highly unethical, could contain useful research.--Matt 13:49, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Suggested Refactor

I think there's some work needed on this page and the one in Alfred Kinsey himself.

Specifically, the details of the controversy should all go into one place. My suggestion is either an article on their own, or a section of this article.

I'd favour a separate article. At present the material on the controversy completely overwhelms what little there is about what the reports actually say. The cynic in me notes that this is exactly the sort of result that lobbiests are paid to achieve.

I think some rearrangement of the material would also help in NPOVing it. The goal is to clearly describe the arguments without promoting either side. Quite a challenge.

Whatever their failings, the Kinsey reports continue to be among the most quoted documents in this whole area of research. Their supporters claim that this is because of the quality and quantity of data that they represent, rather than merely because of their place in history. So the article is important. Andrewa 20:36, 2 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I think moving controversies to separate articles is generally not advisable because it can be interpreted as a weak NPOV violation. The facts speak for themselves.—Eloquence 23:41, 2 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Yes, good point, and you've been doing this for longer than I have I think. That's just the sort of feedback I was after. I've now added a little more content about what the reports actually say, and hopefully put it a bit more clearly. Andrewa 05:56, 3 Sep 2003 (UTC)

OK, that's done. The material I've removed will reappear in the articles linked to over the next few hours. Andrewa 01:32, 5 Sep 2003 (UTC)

"Based on his data and findings, others claimed that ... women enhance their prospects of satisfaction in marriage by masturbating previously. Neither claim was made by Kinsey, but both were (and continue to be) attributed to him."

Including by us further up the page! Which is correct? -- sannse (talk) 21:04, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)

[edit] content?

I came to this page looking for the content of the reports. All I have found are some notes on methodology, then some accusations of child abuse. Why are the reports famous? What did they show? This should be the main topic of the article.

Indeed, Kinsey's hardly my area, but regarding this article as an article in general, I must say, it seems to me that any page on a piece of scholarship 80% of which page is consumed by attention to the negative opinions of the political opponents of the author and virtually none of which is concerned with the academic and statistical content of said scholarship itself is inherently broken beyond repair and simply needs to be thrown away and redone. This page bears no relationship in form or content to the useful summary of an academic study. --Yst 17:06, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Overlap with Alfred Kinsey article

There is currently far too much overlap between this article and the article on Alfred Kinsey. Specifically, the personal attacks against Kinsey are minutely documented in both articles. Rather than obsessing over all the claims and counterclaims, we should offer a concise summary of why the Kinsey Reports were controversial. In place of the pedantic mudslinging, we should offer at least a tiny bit of substance about the reports themselves (of which there is currently none). Kaldari 21:47, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

They're quite big books. Thoroughly fascinating and odd reading. I was looking for 'graffiti' in the index, and found the subject heading 'guinea pig' adjacent to it. The main detraction I've seen in academic work is mostly just a change in social science methodology over the years. Particularly with respect to his sampling technique. Part of the extremity and oddness of some of the findings reflects who he was interviewing, i.e., not a balanced cross-section of the population.Limegreen 1 July 2005 04:24 (UTC)
Yes, but of course who can say what a "balanced" cross-section actually would consist of? More to the point though, I think Kinsey himself was very unsatisfied with the inadequacy of the sample group. Not necessarily its composition per se, but its size. Because he only completed 12,000 interviews, rather than his goal of 100,000, he never considered the Kinsey Reports to be anything more than preliminary findings. Of course if you compare the Kinsey Reports to sex studies done prior to it, the methodologies of the earlier ones are laughable: sample groups of a few hundred consisting entirely of college students! Kaldari 1 July 2005 04:34 (UTC)
He certainly did open up a whole new field, and I don't dispute that. In the process of having a bit of a fix of the Reisman page this afternoon, I discovered that the American Statistical Association, with no lesser people than Tukey being pretty unhappy with it in 1948. It's not the size of your sample, it's how you get them. And how you less representation from the people who don't get included. If you want to generalise to the population, you elect to use a random sampling technique, and try to ensure that if you have 20% of an ethnic group in the population at large, you have 20% (approx) in your sample. I have to emphasise that I'm not anti-Kinsey's research. It's pretty representative of some of the interesting research done in the social sciences that was still being done in the 70s. I guess what I'm saying is that I substantially agree with you. I've been shocked in the last few days to discover the amount of NPOV in psychological topics which I had only previously associated with political ones!!!
FWIW, I'm amazed at how much has been made of the ideological critique, and how little has been made of the academic critique. It needs more of the latter, and less of the former.Limegreen 1 July 2005 08:17 (UTC)
I certainly agree. The ideological critiques are, for the most part, little more than political mudslinging from the usual suspects. This article would certainly be better suited to feature serious critiques of his scientific methodology. Although any such critiques should be careful to emphasize that Kinsey's methodologies were actually rather robust for the time. Of course statistical methods have been significantly refined in the last 50 years, but in the 1940s Kinsey was actually quite a pioneer at establishing any sort of viable methodology in sex research. It should also be noted that Kinsey made a substantial effort to have a diversified sample pool and to control for as many variables as possible, although any such study would obviously be faced with innumerable demographic variables. For example, Kinsey conducted sample interviews in all 50 states (in both urban and rural locales), and controlled for gender, age, education level, and religious background consistently thoughout the study. Kinsey was also careful to limit the conclusions drawn from the data. For example, he refused to make any conclusions about the relationship between race and sexuality since he didn't consider his data in that area to be statistically robust enough. As I said before, he considered the Kinsey Reports to be "preliminary data". In most instances, it was other people, not Kinsey or the Reports themselves, that drew overbroad conclusions from the data. In many ways, Kinsey was his own best critic, although certainly not above the criticism of others, such as Tukey. As you probably know, however, statistics are something more of an artform than a science in many ways. It's always possible to challenge someone's statistical methods, no matter how thorough they are, simply due to the relative impossibility of controlling for all variables. I imagine in many cases such "scientific" attacks were just as politically motivated as those of the religious ilk. That said, I definitely think they should be given adequate coverage in the article, and perhaps appropriate rebuttal if such rebuttals exist. Kaldari 1 July 2005 15:26 (UTC)

[edit] Can I just point something out

This article discusses all the meta stuff about the reports, but doesn't actually substantively say what was in them. This strikes me as an information deficit that needs correcting. ~~~~ 2 July 2005 15:32 (UTC)

I don't think anyone would disagree with you. Please feel free to add some actual substance to this article. Kaldari 2 July 2005 20:30 (UTC)
I only photocopied the few pages relevant to my work, which are only a tiny (and not particularly interesting) subset of the massive whole. I should point out, however, that the findings of my own research (conducted in a different country 50 years later), and those of others, broadly confirm Kinsey's findings. However, graffiti is not at all the core of the reports, so not really worth mentioning..... Limegreen 3 July 2005 00:22 (UTC)

[edit] Content in need of verification

Moved here from Bisexuality:

Some studies, notably Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), have indicated that the majority of people appear to be at least somewhat bisexual. (Kinsey was himself bisexual.) The studies report that most people have some attraction to either sex, although usually one sex is preferred. According to some (falsely attributed to Kinsey), only about 5-10% of the population can be considered to be fully heterosexual or homosexual. On the other hand, an even smaller minority can be considered truly bisexual, that is, having no distinct preference for one gender or the other.

I'm holding off on putting this in the article until its accuracy can be confirmed. Anyone? -- Beland 05:09, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

Sounds roughly accurate, although I haven't read Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. We need to get rid of the weasel term though: "According to some". This paragraph seems pretty useful to have in the Bisexuality article though. I would encourage the editors to reintergrate some of it back into that article rather than remove it entirely. Kaldari 17:37, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
I have integrated the material from Bisexuality into this article (in the new Findings section). Kaldari 23:14, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Contradictions

The first line tells us that the work is "controversal", the last part tells us it is generally accepted. Both can't be right. Given the arguments presented in the article, I'm removing the word "controversal", as the controversy seems to have been taken care of.

--Scot W. Stevenson 00:59, 6 January 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Clarification

"Criticism principally revolved around the perceived over-representation of some groups in the sample: 25% were, or had been, prison inmates, and 5% were male prostitutes." The phrase "perceived over-representation" makes it sound as if there was in fact no over-representation. Unless someone is willing to argue that 25% of the general population was made up of current and former inmates, or 5% of male prostitutes, I think "percieved" should probably be removed.

[edit] Context and significance

I have an edit in mind, but I don't have a full feel for how true it is...

CURRENTLY: "Many of Kinsey's conclusions, while radical for the time, are now generally accepted."
SUGGESTED: "Kinsey's conclusions, while radical for the time, slowly gained generally acceptance over the following decades."

The edit removes the "now? when was that?" problem. Also it should lead to a listing of what was accepted, and what was not (or has not yet). I really think that "Many of" is playing fast and loose with something that should be specified and cited -- it isn't encyclopedic. (Yes, I know, don't complain about work that hasn't been done yet, ... do it. So maybe these are to-do notes for myself. ;-) ) --Charles Gaudette 20:48, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree that we should list those conclusions that are now accepted. Because it seems to me that Kinsey was enormously influential a generation after his research, but that his findings are now increasingly being questioned or replaced. For example, the idea of sexuality as fluid has taken quite a lot of hits from biological research in the past decade or so. DanB†DanD 22:22, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

What "conclusion" are we talking about. Supporters, in defence of Kinsely, claimed that Kinsely never explcitly claim that his sampling subjects are representative of U.S. population. If he never made like of "radical" claim such as 10% of American are homosexual, what kind of radical conclusion did he make? Is it that "deviant" sexual behaviours exist? Duh, read Frued. Plus, this kind of sampling procedure are, by definition, faulty unless being verified by by other source. Problems is so well know and obvious to anyone who done statistics that I wonder what kind of Kinsely finding are accepted by whom. In fact, most modern academic would argue that any studies based on this type of sampling method are useless from the outset. If I collected sampling from people who are willing to talk for hours about chess, then, what is the likelihood of me getting test subjects who never played chess? Modern polling method correct this kind of bias, firstly, by making randomly approach to potential samples and, secondly, by repeatedly verifing the correlation of their sample with other statistical sources (e.g. voting intention can be verified after the event, diet habit can be indirectly verified from supermarket). Either Kinsely didn't make any radical claim, in which case, his conclusion (chess player talk about chess) is useless or Kinsely did make radical claim, in which case, his conclusions are erroneous. Vapour

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