Kinsey Report

The Kinsey Report was the result of a study conducted by Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy and other collaborators published in two books, Sexual Conduct of Man (1948) and < i>Sexual behavior of women (1953). It was carried out by interviewing more than 20,000 men and women with a system of complete confidentiality, who responded to an anonymous questionnaire, managing to create a database that described sexual behavior in human beings, generating great surprise in 1948 when it touched on behaviors that until then They had remained in the strictest privacy both for the scientific community and for society. It brought into debate behaviors that until then most considered marginal, or even immoral, such as masturbation, both female and male, homosexuality and bisexuality, or the early age of sexual initiation.

What has had the most impact to date is the Kinsey scale, a division into 7 degrees of sexual tendency, ranging from absolute heterosexuality to complete homosexuality, passing through five degrees of bisexuality, where it was also stated that a large part of the population was to some degree bisexual. According to the study, for example, 60% of men and 33% of women had participated in at least one homosexual practice since the age of 16 and that at least a third of men had achieved orgasm in homosexual practices.. However, it should be noted that the definition of "sexual contact" The Kinsey report is quite broad, and includes everything from kisses on the lips, deep kisses on the mouth, touching the body, masturbation and oral sex, to vaginal or anal intercourse.

This report provokes great controversy to this day, especially due to the methods of access to information, the selection of interviewees (mostly prisoners and homosexual prostitutes), as well as the origin of the information on sexual behavior in children.

Findings

Sexual orientation

Parts of the sexual orientation diversity report are frequently used to support the estimate that 10% of the population is homosexual. Instead of using three categories (heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual), four categories were used (a fourth category, asexual, was added by Kinsey's colleagues).

The reports established that about 46% of the male subjects surveyed had "reacted" sexually with people of both sexes in the course of their lives as adults, and 37% have had at least one homosexual experience/response. It was also established that 11.6% of the white men surveyed, who ranged in age from 20 and 35 years old, were rated with a value of 3 on the scale, that is, they had equally had heterosexual and homosexual experiences/responses throughout their adult lives. In addition, the study reported that 10% of the American men who were surveyed they had been "more or less" exclusively homosexuals for at least 3 years between the ages of 16 and 55" (that is, they were in the range 5 or 6 on the scale).

As for women, it was reported that 7% of single women and 4% of women planning to get married surveyed, whose ages ranged from 20 to 35 years, were rated with a value of 3 in the scale (they had equally heterosexual and homosexual experiences/responses) for that period of their lives. In addition to the fact that 2 to 6% of the women, whose age range ranged from 20 to 35 years, were " more or less" exclusively homosexual, and 1 to 3% of unmarried women between the ages of 20 and 35 had exclusively homosexual responses/experiences.

Reviews

Two main problems that were noted were that significant portions of those interviewed came from men's prisons (with a high incidence of homosexual sexual relations) and prostitutes, and that the people who volunteered to be interviewed about taboo topics are prone to suffer from the "self-selection problem". This jeopardizes the usefulness of the sample in terms of determining trends in North American society in general.

In 1948, the same year as Kinsey's publication, a committee of the American Statistical Association, including notable statisticians such as John Tukey, condemned the sampling procedure. Tukey was perhaps the biggest critic, saying that "a random selection of three people would have been better than a group of 300 chosen by Mr. Kinsey." Psychologist Abraham Maslow stated that Kinsey did not consider the "bias of the volunteer." The data only represents those volunteers who participated in the interview, especially on the taboo topics mentioned. Most Americans at the time did not discuss the intimate details of their sex lives, even with their spouses and close friends, which is why Kinsey's findings could not be considered representative. Before the publication of Kinsey's reports, Maslow tested the impartiality of Kinsey's volunteers. He concluded that Kinsey's sample was not representative of society. In 1954, leading statisticians, including William Gemmell Cochran, Frederick Mosteller, John Tukey, and WO Jenkins issued through the American Statistical Association a critique of Kinsey's report on male sexuality, stating that

“Both cumulatively taken these objections, we dare to say that many of what is written in the book is below the level of a good scientific text. ”