FORUMS FOR HUMAN SEXUALITY HEALTH

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Chapter Two

Studying Human Sexuality

Sex, Advice Columnists,
and Pop Psychology

  • The sex information/advice genre seeks to:
  • Inform—transmit information that is factual and accurate
  • Entertain—attract audiences through hosts’ personalities as well as high-interest or bizarre material
  • Often includes moral judgments
  • Use social science and psychiatry to give authority

Use and Abuse of Statistics

  • Popular media may summarize social science research in an oversimplified or distorted manner
  • Sensationalize findings
  • Over generalize results of research
  • Report statistics that agree with widely-held preconceptions
  • Popular media may not emphasize the importance of replication

Thinking Critically about Sex

  • Basic scientific principles require a commitment to objectivity
  • observation of reality while excluding researchers’ feelings or beliefs

  • Subjectivity is to be avoided
  • Difficult to achieve especially in the area of sexuality
  • Sexuality can bring out powerful emotions and moral ambivalence

Value Judgments: Limitations

  • Do not tell us what motivates people
  • Do not tell us how frequently people behave in a given way
  • Do not tell us how people feel
  • Only tell us how we ourselves feel

Value Judgments vs. Objectivity

  • Value judgments only reveal the thoughts or feelings of one person
  • Objectivity describes reality
  • Objective positions can be tested
  • Cultural relativity requires that we examine appropriateness within the cultural norms where it exists

Value Judgments vs. Objectivity

  • Value judgments imply how a person ought to behave
  • Objective statements describe how people actually behave
  • Value judgments cannot be empirically evaluated
  • Objective statements can be empirically evaluated

Opinions, Biases, and Stereotypes Interfere with the Pursuit of Knowledge

  • Opinions are unsubstantiated beliefs or conclusions according to an individual’s personal thoughts
  • Biases are personal leanings or inclinations
  • Stereotypes are sets of overgeneralized beliefs about an individual, a group, or an idea, etc.

Stereotypes

  • A schema is a way of organizing information which often underlies stereotypes
  • Sexual stereotyping is often used to justify discrimination or social groups
  • Women
  • Poor people
  • African Americans, Latino/as, Asian Americans
  • Gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people

Stereotypes

  • Stereotypes structure our knowledge by shaping:
  • What we see
  • What we notice
  • What we remember
  • How we explain things

Attitudes and Behavior

  • Attitude: a predisposition a person has to act, think, or feel in certain ways
  • Behavior: the way a person acts

  • Behavior does not predict attitude and vice versa
  • Frequent discrepancies exist between the two on individual and cultural levels which can result in confusion

Common Fallacies: Egocentrism and Ethnocentrism

  • Fallacy: an error in reasoning that affects our understanding of a subject
  • Egocentric fallacy: the belief that our own personal experience and values are generally held by others
  • Ethnocentric fallacy: the belief that one’s own ethnic group, nation, or culture’s values and customs are innately superior to others’

Egocentrism and Ethnocentrism

  • Often occur in our consideration of different ethnic groups
  • Transmitted from one generation to another
  • Prevent understanding from a culturally relative position

Sex Research Methods

  • Scientific Method: the method by which a hypothesis is formed from impartially gathered data and tested empirically.
  • Induction: drawing a general conclusion from specific facts
  • Seeks to describe the world rather than to evaluate or judge it

Research Concerns

  • Ethical
  • Concerns use of human beings as subjects of research
  • Methodological
  • Concerns center on information-gathering techniques and accuracy
  • A representative sample of people is necessary to draw accurate conclusions

Ethical Issues

  • Informed consent
  • Full disclosure of purpose, risk, benefits
  • Agreement to participate may be withdrawn
  • Protection from harm
  • Emotional distress must be avoided
  • Identity of subjects must be confidential

Sampling

  • Sample: a portion of a larger group of people are observed or studied
  • Inferences are made to the larger group
  • Good samples are:
  • Random
  • Representative
  • Unbiased

Limitations of Samples Restrict Generalizations

  • Depend on volunteers or clients
  • Takes place at universities or colleges with student volunteers
  • Some ethnic groups are underrepresented
  • Gay men, lesbian women, bisexual and transgendered people may not be publicly identified

Clinical Research

  • An in-depth examination of an individual or group that comes to a specialist for assistance with disorders and problems
  • Limited by an emphasis on pathological behavior
  • Shaped by cultural definitions of what is pathological

Survey Research

  • Questionnaires
  • Administered quickly
  • Forced choice allows many formats
  • Interviews
  • Allow more information to be gathered
  • Allow subjects to guide topics
  • Sexual diaries
  • Collect richer information
  • May work well with some subjects but not all

Survey Research Limitations

  • Subjects may report self behavior with bias
  • Interviewers may collect information with a bias
  • Subjects may be embarrassed in an interview
  • Accuracy of subjects’ memory fades as time passes
  • Difficult for subjects to accurately estimate factors such as how long sexual encounters last

Observational Research

  • The researcher unobtrusively observes and makes notes about people’s behavior
  • Serious ethical issues in observing sexual behavior without subjects’ knowledge or consent
  • Known observation generally affects behavior

Participant Observation

  • The researcher participates in the behaviors which she or he is studying
  • Used frequently by anthropologists
  • Is sex research controversial because it compromises objectivity?

Experimental Research

  • The systematic manipulation variables to examine the effect on behavior

  • Independent variables: factors that can be manipulated and changed by the experimenter
  • Dependent variables: factors that are likely to be affected by changes in the independent variable

An Example of Experimental Research

  • Examine effect of various amounts of alcohol on sexual arousal
  • Alcohol—independent variable
  • Plethysmograph measurement of arousal—dependent variable
  • Causal effect demonstrated

The Sex Researchers

  • In 19th century, Western sexuality began to be studied from a scientific framework
  • Fascinated with “pathologies” of sex: fetishism, sadism, masturbation, homosexuality
  • Since that time, a liberalizing trend in our thinking about sexuality
  • 20th century researchers viewed sexuality more positively

The Sex Researchers

  • Three themes evident in later 20th century sex researchers’ work:
  • Belief that sexual expression is essential to an individual’s well being
  • Desire to broaden the range of legitimate sexual activity, including homosexuality
  • Belief that female sexuality is equal to male sexuality

Richard von Krafft-Ebing
(1840-1902)

  • Psychopathia Sexualis (1886):
  • A collection of the case histories of fetishists, sadists, masochists, and homosexuals
  • Attributed variations in Victorian sexuality to “hereditary taint,” “moral degeneracy,” and masturbation
  • Brought public attention to sexual behaviors that had never been documented

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

  • Dramatically impacted Western ideas
  • Sexuality begins at birth with five-stage development:
  • Oral stage (birth to 1 year)
  • Anal stage (age 1-3)
  • Phallic stage (age 3-5)
  • Latency stage (age 6-puberty)
  • Genital stage (puberty onward)

Sigmund Freud: Phallic stage

  • Oedipal Complex: Boy develops sexual desires for mother and fears father
  • Castration anxiety: Fears his father will cut off his penis: castration anxiety
  • Electra complex: Girl develops sexual desire for father and fears mother
  • Penis envy: Girls never acquire the “lost penis” and therefore fail to develop an independent character like that of boys
  • By age 6, boys and girls resolve their complexes by relinquishing their desires for their parents and identifying with their same-sex parent

Sigmund Freud: Impact

  • Freud was pioneering in commitment to science and explorations of the unconscious
  • Over the past generation, his influence among American sex researchers has dwindled
  • Lack of empiricism
  • Inadequate description of female development
  • Questions of relevance to contemporary society
  • In the field of sex research, his work is now primarily of historical interest

Havelock Ellis (1859-1939)

  • One of the first modern affirmers of sexuality
  • Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897-1910)
  • Pointed out the relativity of sexual values
  • Appealed to case studies as well as studies in animal behavior, anthropology, and history
  • Challenged view that masturbation was abnormal
  • Documented existence of women’s sexual desires
  • Reevaluated homosexuality as a congenital condition

Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956)

  • The Kinsey Reports
  • Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)
  • Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)
  • Statistical documentation of American sexual behavior
  • Showed a significant discrepancy between public standards and actual standards of sexual behavior

Alfred Kinsey: Impact

  • Sexual Diversity and Variation
  • Extraordinary diversity in behaviors of subjects
  • Many subjects (e.g. 50% of men) had sexual experiences with members of the same-sex

  • Reevaluation of Masturbation
  • Important for women
  • Harmless
  • Pleasurable

Alfred Kinsey: Controversy

  • Same sex behavior
  • Labels of “heterosexual” and “homosexual” were inadequate ways of understanding sexual behavior
  • Devised the “Kinsey Scale”
  • Rejection of normal/abnormal dichotomy
  • Sexual differences are a matter of degree, not kind
  • Became an advocate of the tolerance
  • Decline of society

Kinsey’s Scale from 0 to 6

Alfred Kinsey: Criticisms

  • Statistical methodology: unrepresentative sampling
  • Emphasis on quantification of sexual behavior
  • Rejection of the psychological dimension (reducing behavior to genital activity)

William Masters (1915-2001) and Virginia Johnson (1925-)

  • Human Sexual Response (1966)
  • Detailed the sexual response cycles of hundreds of male and female research subjects
  • Combined clinical observation with direct measurement of genital arousal using electronic devices

Masters and Johnson: Outcomes

  • Similarity of male and female sexual responses
  • Women achieve orgasms via clitoral stimulation
  • Legitimized female masturbation

Masters and Johnson: Outcomes

  • Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970)
  • Argued that sexual problems were not the result of neuroses or personality disorders
  • Rather, lack of information, poor communication, or relationship conflict contributed
  • Used behavioral therapy to treat sexual problems with great success

Contemporary Research Studies

  • Several large, national, or multi-site sexuality related studies have recently been conducted
  • The National Health and Social Life Survey (1994)
  • The Youth Risk Behavior Survey (biannual)
  • The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (annual)
  • The National Survey of Family Growth (periodic)
  • College Alcohol Study (every few years)
  • Community Intervention Trial for Youth Project

Contemporary Research Studies

  • Large scale national sexuality related studies
  • Smaller scale studies
  • Difficulties due to political and social climate
  • Restricted funding

The National Health and Social Life Survey 1994

  • Americans are largely monogamous
  • On average, Americans have sex about once a week
  • Adultery is the exception, not the rule
  • Most Americans rank vaginal intercourse as most preferred activity

The National Health and Social Life Survey (cont.)

  • Homosexuality less prevalent than originally believed
  • Orgasms appear to be the rule for men and the exception for women
  • Forced sex and the misperception of it remain critical problems
  • 3% of Americans claim never to have had sex

The National Survey of Family Growth 2002

  • A majority of Americans report experiencing a great deal of diverse sexual activity
  • A small percentage of Americans report experiencing homosexual activity
  • American men report more partners then women
  • A large group of Americans do not report using condoms in the last year

The Youth Risk Behavior Survey 2003

  • Almost half report having had sexual intercourse
  • Few report having had sexual intercourse with four or more partners
  • Over half report using a condom during their last sexual intercourse
  • One fourth report of sexually active students report using alcohol or drugs during most recent sexual experience

National College Health Assessment 2005

  • Majority report a new sex partner in the last year
  • Half report experiencing oral sex within the last month
  • Half report experiencing vaginal sex within the last month
  • Students do not routinely use condoms
  • Birth control pills and condoms are the most commonly used contraceptive

Emerging Research Perspectives

  • Feminist scholarship
  • Focus on gender issues
  • Examines distribution of power in sexual relationships
  • Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender
  • Focus on personal experience
  • Examines social and psychological components

Feminist Scholarship Principles

  • Gender is significant
  • Female experience devalued
  • Power is critical in relationships
  • Different methodologies must be incorporated
  • Ethnic diversity must be addressed

Important GLBT researchers across time

  • Ulriches
  • Kertbeny
  • Hirschfeld
  • Hooker
  • Foucault

Critical Inclusions for Future Research

  • Expanded definitions of sexuality
  • Intervention based research
  • Accepting and positive representation of sexuality

Directions for Future Research

  • Global perspective
  • Inclusion of other fields of scientific study

Ethnicity and Sexuality

  • Researchers have begun to recognize differences among ethnic groups
  • Related factors: socioeconomic status, environment, methodology, researcher’s stereotypes

African Americans and Research

  • Sexual stereotypes
  • Socioeconomic status
  • Racism
  • Black subcultures

Latinos and Research

  • Sexual stereotypes
  • Traditional cultures
  • Catholicism
  • Acculturation

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders

  • Increase in population
  • Collectivist culture
  • Immigration
  • Sexual stereotypes

Summary

  • Sex, advice columnists, and pop psychology
  • Methods of sex research
  • History of sex research
  • Challenges for the future