The Kinsey Reports are two scholarly books on human sexual behavior, Sexual Behavior in the Human MaleSexual Behavior in the Human Male, . (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human FemaleKinsey, A.; Pomeroy, W.; Martin, C., & Gebhard, P. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Philadelphia: Saunders (1953), . (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. The data were later computerized for processing. All of this material, including the original researchers' notes, remains available from the Kinsey Institute to qualified researchers who demonstrate a need to view such materials. The institute also allows researchers to use statistical software in order to analyze the data.
Findings
Sexual orientation
Parts of the Kinsey Reports regarding diversity in sexual orientations are frequently used to support the common estimate of 10% for homosexuality in the general population. Instead of three categories (heterosexual, bisexual and homosexual), a seven-point Kinsey scale system was used.
The reports also state that nearly 46% of the male subjects had "reacted" sexually to persons of both sexes in the course of their adult lives, and 37% had at least one homosexual experience.Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, p. 656 11.6% of white men (ages 20–35) were given a rating of 3 (about equal heterosexual and homosexual experience/response) throughout their adult lives.Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Table 147, p. 651 The study also reported that 10% of American men 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).Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, p. 651
7% of single women (ages 20–35) and 4% of previously married women (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.Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Table 142, p. 499 2 to 6% of women, aged 20–35, were more or less exclusively homosexual in experience/response,Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, p. 488 and 1 to 3% of unmarried women aged 20–35 were exclusively homosexual in experience/response.Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Table 142, p. 499, and p. 474
Kinsey scale
The Kinsey scale, ranging from 0 to 6, represents a person's sexuality, 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,"Kinsey Male volume, pages 638 and 647; Female volume, page 472. 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: RatingDescription0Exclusively heterosexual1Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual2Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual3Equally heterosexual and homosexual4Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual5Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual6Exclusively homosexualXNo socio-sexual contacts or reactions
Men: 11.6% of white men aged 20–35 were given a rating of 3 for this period of their lives.Kinsey, et al. 1948. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Table 147, p. 651 Women: 7% of single women aged 20–35 and 4% of previously married women aged 20–35 were given a rating of 3 for this period of their lives.Kinsey, et al. 1953. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Table 142, p. 499 2 to 6% of women, aged 20–35, were given a rating of 5Kinsey, et al. 1953. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, p. 488 and 1 to 3% of unmarried women aged 20–35 were rated as 6.Kinsey, et al. 1953. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Table 142, p. 499, and p. 474
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.Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, p. 348-349, 351. Kinsey estimated that approximately 50% of all married men had extramarital sex at some time during their married lives.Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, pp. 585, 587 Among the sample, 26% of women had extramarital sex by their forties. Between 1 in 6 and 1 in 10 women from age 26 to 50 were engaged in extramarital sex.Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, p. 416 However, Kinsey classified couples who have lived together for at least a year as "married", inflating the statistics for extra-marital sex.Kinsey, Alfred. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, p. 53.Jones, James H. (1997). Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life. New York: Norton.
Sadomasochism 12% of women and 22% of men reported having an erotic response to a sadomasochistic story.Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, pp. 677-678
Biting Responses to being bitten: Erotic Responses By Women By Men Definite and/or frequent 26% 26% Some response 29% 24% Never 45% 50%+ Number of cases 2200 567
Zoophilia The report estimated the amount of American citizens that have engaged in zoophilia to be approximately eight million.
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.Jones 1997, p. 658 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:
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.
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 men and 12.7% for those with less education.Martin Duberman on Gebhart's "cleaning" of data
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. If the study is trying to gather information about any sort of population subgroups, as Kinsey was, the small percentages of the population plus the high rates of refusal may make these subgroups effectively disappear, despite their importance to the study.
Volunteer bias