In: Psychology
Nature of funding for sex research? Be familiar with Kinsey’s publications. What was the focus of Kinsey’s research? Limitations of his research approach? How does it differ from Kinsey institute’s current approach? Nature of his research bias?
Sexology is one of the important area of academics for the past two centuries. It is the scientific study that includes human sexual behaviors, interests, and functions. This study is mostly studied together with eugenics which is a practice to improve future generations through a method of selecting selective breeding of human species. Funding of sex research has been done by funding agencies and academic journals. Guidelines would be given by the agencies before preceding the sex research.
Kinsey's publications: In 1948, he published the book, 'Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,' which was a bestselling book. In 1953, he published the book, 'Sexual Behavior in the Human Female' which was more controversial and got more media coverage. Some of the books were published after his death in 1962 were In 1965, 'Sex Offenders: An Analysis of Types' In 1978, 'Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women' and in 1989, 'Sexuality and Morality in the U.S.'
Sex research at the Kinsey institute: Psychologist played a major role in Kinsey Institute in exploring things related to the topic. In the year 1938, Indiana University women students who were either engaged or married were asked for the sex research. They helped a lot in the field of sexuality research. Alfred C. Kinsey, ScD, the zoology professor were asked to coordinate a class on reproduction, sexuality, contraception and other related topics. While preparing for the class, he found that the materials available by that time were not sufficient for the study so he wanted to create his own data to support the study. For which, he had one-to-one interviews to almost 8,000 people to know about their sex lives along with his colleagues and collected some more 10,000 sexual histories. The measuring scale by Kinsey measured the overall performance of a person's homosexuality and heterosexuality by considering both psychosocial reactions and sexual experience of a person.
Limitations of the research approach: The limitation of Kinsey was that it failed to examine the sexual behavior of people of different color in the United States. It focused mostly on middle-aged and college educated Americans, most of them were under the age 35. In spite of these drawbacks, his reports highlighted as the benchmarks in the sexuality study in U.S.
Today's psychologists conducting research about sex research is far more different than Kinsey's research. In today's study, they started researching not only sexuality but they also include the love and relationship of both female and male.
Nature of Kinsey research bias was considered as volunteer bias, the research was done prior to 1950s, where there were more conservative ethics. Many people were not ready to share the intimate details of their sexual life. In the research the scores obtained from different background, namely the volunteers who agreed to share their views versus who did not agree. His research scale is still used in today's research.