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Concept
Kinsey Reports
Summary
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).
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.
Surveys of sexual behavior were considered 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).
Official source
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