Customer Reviews

Sex in America: A Definitive Survey

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This book is the culmination of an enormous undertaking. 9,000 addresses were selected from random geographical locations. The participants, aged 18 to 55 years, completed an hour and a half interview about their sexual practices. Anyone interested in human sexuality will want to learn about the results from this study. Although this book does not go into the depth or detail of "The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the Unites States," this book is more user-friendly. This book is a must for therapists who deal not only with sexulaity issuess but also relationship issues. Previous research has demonstrated that all couples have arguments about work, money and sex. Thus, it is essential to learn what the actual sexual practices of couples are and this book is a tool with a wealth of information.

Driven by the publicity of American sexual habits after movies like Kinsey, I took it upon myself to begin reading into just how much of the hype was realistic. Could Americans truly be as hypersexed as Kinsey's studies seemed to show? Was it true that one out of every ten Americans was homosexual? Sex in America answers these questions as part of the first scientifically-sound mass-studies of American sexuality ever undertaken by social science. Breaking through the harsh stigma of sex and sexuality, Sex in America points in an unexpected direction: Americans aren't as Bohemian as we might think.

This finding: That Americans are not as erotic as the media and popular myth believes us to be, may be the most significant thing about Sex in America. We have been trained to think many things about ourselves and others: That AIDS can affect anyone, that sex drops off with marriage, that young people have the most partners and the shortest relationships. Through thorough, statistically-sound research, the social scientists behind Sex in America show that just about every preconception we have about human sexuality has turned out to be wrong.

Now we know.

This book is incredible not just for the data it presents, but for the first chapter, which presents an exceptional picture of the damage that bad survey data can have on an entire nation. The incredibly ill-designed surveys of the past have warped American's views of themselves and our country, and the book details why. If there was ever a treatise on why we should all learn statistics, this is it.

This study was attacked from the beginning by the Neither Religious Nor Right. If it wasn't the questions, the methodology,and the funding, it was a political maelstrom that almost stopped this study in its' tracks.
The study points out just how different we really are from many preconceptions. It also is honest enough to deliberately point out the areas of study that need to be more completely done.
What it does is to give us a reappraisal that was needed. It is now time for another study. The study must take into account many of the findings of this particular study.
The study needs to take regional population as a factor. It fully needs to take Gay, Lesbian, Bi, and Transgendered populations into account. It should discuss the various islands of populations such as LA, Atlanta, New York City, and the rural populations. The questionaire needs to be free of Right Wing Politics playing to the Neither Religious Nor Right. It must ask hard direct questions about sexuality that were removed from the original study.The number of participants needs to be expanded. The study needs to be properly funded. This was in fact a shoe string study fraught with many problems that almost completely derailed it.
I bought this in Hardback years ago for $50.00. It was money well spent.

A lot of groups with particular agendas attack this study because it doesn't confirm the biases of the past. But just because you don't like it, that doesn't mean it isn't true.

And that's really the heart of this study, trying to get to the truth.

Or at least a better version of the truth than what we've had in the past.

I highly recommend this if only to see just how difficult it is to conduct a "good" statistically valid survey of this type. The resulting data are somewhat incidental, and not likely to be grossly affected by the minor irregularities in the methodology. And for those with actual statistical methodological training, the authors provide their data for review.

When this book was first published, it was largely panned for its research methodology. The responses and conclusions are suspect because the interviewers were deemed too aggressive in collecting the data.

This book is interesting only as a object lesson in what happens when a person is asked personal questions they don't want to answer.

This study was done 15 years ago! A lot has changed.

Also, while the authors are quick to dismiss other surveys and studies they neglect to tell us what is wrong with them scientifically and statistically. Yet they fail to mention their own test parameters except in very vague terms giving us only total number of test subjects interviewed, less then 2,000! This seems like way too small a sample size to project what 300,000,000 Americans are doing and thinking about sex!