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Alfred Kinsey: Research
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Alfred Kinsey spent 25 years conducting his famous sex surveys. From 1938 to 1963, he and his staff interviewed more than 18,000 men and women, asking about the relative frequency of practices like masturbation and premarital, extramarital, and homosexual sex. And almost half a century later, many of his results are still embedded in the public imagination. The great man's research methods have been called into question—in the 2004 biopic Kinsey, for example—and yet, who hasn't heard that 10 percent of men are gay, or that half of married men have had adulterous affairs? (For more Kinsey stats, click here.)
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Under Wheeler, Kinsey worked almost completely autonomously, which suited both men quite well. For his doctoral thesis, Kinsey chose to do research on gall wasps. Kinsey began collecting samples of gall wasps with obsessive zeal, traveling widely and taking 26 detailed measurements on hundreds of thousands of gall wasps. His methodology made an important contribution to entomology as a science. Kinsey was granted his doctoral degree in 1919, by Harvard. He published several papers in 1920, under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, introducing the gall wasp to the scientific community and laying out its phylogeny.
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Initially, Kinsey had the help of one graduate student, whom he paid $900 per year out of his own faculty salary. The first outside financial assistance he received for sex research was $1,600 from the National Research Council in 1941. By 1942 scientists of the Medical Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, after a thorough investigation of Kinsey's work, recommended that the foundation give its support. This it did with grants of as much as $100,000 a year allocated through the National Research Council. By 1954... the Rockefeller Foundation cancelled its contribution.
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Kinsey's primary method of data collection was to administer surveys — consisting of about 350 very personal questions — about sexual behavior to as many willing participants as possible. After collecting the sexual histories of thousands of individuals, Kinsey painted a portrait of a carnal nation, a portrait that he said was based on an accurate cross-section of America. But as the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow [a friend of Kinsey's] pointed out, most people will not fill out a voluminous survey composed of intensely personal questions. Consequently, an inordinate percentage of such respondents will be people of easy virtue who engage in aberrant sexual behavior. This is an outcome-skewing factor that was even more significant fifty-five years ago, when people were much more reluctant to discuss these matters than they are today. What this means is that it was difficult to develop a clear picture of the average person's sexual behavior through such research, even when you tried.
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Kinsey married Clara Bracken McMillen, whom he called Mac, in 1921. They had four children. Their first-born, Don, died from the acute complications of juvenile diabetes in 1927, just before his fifth birthday. (This was five years after the first patient was successfully treated with insulin injections, in 1922, and it was three years after the Nobel Prize was awarded for discovering the efficacy of Insulin. It is unusual for a life-scientist's family to be so behind medical research, but in the early 20th century, scientific research was not a very lucrative profession, so one might have learned of leading-edge treatments without actually receiving them.) Daughter Anne was born in 1924, daughter Joan in 1925, and son Bruce in 1928.
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At a preview screening of the film in Washington, D.C., director Condon offered the surprising opinion that Kinsey would have had strong reservations about the contemporary gay movement. Americans still tend to think of sexuality in binary terms: a world of absolute straights and gays, with the mysterious bisexual tacked on as an afterthought. Kinsey mapped sexual orientation on a seven-point scale, on which exclusive heterosexuality and homosexuality were only the extremes—a scale further developed by later researchers. That view has penetrated popular consciousness far less than Kinsey's other findings. (Some gay activists may fear that a less rigidly binary view of sexuality would give ammunition to traditionalists: "If it's all a fluid continuum, then why can't you change?")
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