Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

As Kinsey and others discovered to their cost, sex research is fraught with problems for researchers and must be managed carefully. In the US, Congress has cut or threatened the funding in recent decades for two national surveys of sexual behavior: a study of massage parlor workers and a study of sexual risk-taking, among other topics. And those who publish research invite trouble, as the University of Minnesota Press found when it published Judith Levine's Harmful to Minors . Although researchers have been concerned about this problem for over 100 years, Kinsey was the first to discuss it explicitly. Worried abut guarding the confidentiality of the thousands of respondents who agreed to share their sex histories, he trained his hand-picked interviewers to learn the questions and write the answers in carefully guarded code, and he kept locks on all the materials in his institute. Even so, in 1954, when Congress investigated the Rockefeller Foundation to punish it for opposing the House Un-American Activities Committee, the only issue raised was their funding of Kinsey's research. As a result, the funding ceased. While sociologists argue that we become sexual just like we become anything else, those who engage in sexuality research recognize that their work differs from that of others, for the reasons outlined above. These researchers have responded to the perceived dangers by careful ... log in or subscribe to read full text