As insurance against the ax falling, however, the U. of C. researchers had already been in contact with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to fund an alternative, scaled-down study, projected to cost $2 million. With the signs worsening, Laumann and his partners also enlisted the help of several other private organizations, including the Kaiser Family Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the New York Community Trust and the American Foundation for AIDS Research.
Disappointing though it was to have to downsize the survey, the picture was far from bleak. In fact, the researchers felt somewhat freed. ”One good outcome of being forced to go to this private-funding approach,” Laumann says, ”is that we were able to put back some of the ticklish questions we wanted originally to include.”
By late 1991, the Yugo was ready to roll.
Tall and rumpled, a fancier of bow ties, Alfred Kinsey made an unlikely sexual iconoclast. He did not date a woman until he was 27. He reacted to a college friend`s confession that he masturbated by dropping down and praying for the friend`s soul. Possessed of a monumental capacity for gathering data, he scoured Latin American rain forests in the early 1930s collecting 3.5 million specimens of gall wasp, which he then measured for 28 variables.
An eagle scout and stamp enthusiast, he was an inveterate straight arrow to whom partying meant spinning classical records for his friends on Sunday nights as they sat stiffly in their chairs.
But it was precisely Kinsey`s uprightness and devotion to science that made it possible for him to change how Americans thought about sex. His squeaky-clean image and correct, academic manner made it difficult to portray him as a lecher.
Kinsey did not set out to be the father of sex research in America or the intellectual heir of such pioneers in human sexuality as Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing. But when he was asked by the university in 1938 to teach a course on marital problems, he became shocked by how little scientific information on human sexual behavior there was to pass along to students. His solution was vintage Kinsey. He would harvest the data himself, just as he had with his wasps.
He started in a back-fence way, interviewing friends about their sex lives, but he soon expanded his quest to include students, faculty and then people outside the university. Subjects tended to open up to this very proper man and his staff, and by 1948, when he published his first book, ”Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” Kinsey and his colleagues had accumulated 12,000 personal histories.
That there was a need for his books is shown by their having sold more than a million copies despite being unflaggingly dry and clogged with statistics. But even Kinsey didn`t anticipate that his volumes would remain almost the sole repository of cumulative national information on sex habits for nearly half a century-so enduring that the U.S. Public Health Department`s estimates of how many people harbor the HIV virus is based on his hoary estimate that one in 10 people is gay.
”If we had been doing studies of sex behavior after Kinsey, we wouldn`t have entered the AIDS era without knowing how many gay men there are or how many partners they have,” Gagnon says.
The antiquity of Kinsey`s data is in itself suspect. American society of the 1930s and 1940s was dramatically different from today`s. ”But the big problem with Kinsey is his sample,” Laumann says. ”It was not in any way a scientific, random sampling of the population. All of the people were volunteers recruited by Kinsey.”
Moreover, they were almost all white, well-educated and young. There were scarcely any blacks, Hispanics or Asians, and although working-class people were interviewed, few, if any, poverty-level people were included. The sample was also geographically skewed, centering primarily on the Midwest and Northeast, with barely any input from the South or West.
”You have to ask yourself,” Gagnon says, ”how representative were the university women Kinsey interviewed. Women who went to graduate school in the 1940s were unusual people. In those days, you had to kick your way into grad school if you were female. That`s the problem with the Kinsey data. You can use it only if you first know who these folks were.
”The result is that it`s dangerous to generalize from the sample,”
Gagnon adds.
Of course, when Kinsey did his work, scientific sampling was in its infancy. ”He didn`t quite get it,” Michael says. ”He pioneered millions of other things, but in that area he was a man of his times.”
By 1970, when NORC undertook its first sex survey, ”they had it right,” Michael says. ”They used a scientific sample. But they made one wrong decision. They were afraid to ask questions face to face. Why? Because there clearly are response effects. People tend to underreport socially undesirable things and overstate desirable things. They overreport having library cards, for instance, or having voted in the last election, while they underreport the number of traffic tickets or abortions they`ve had. So you get lower rates than you know must exist.
”It`s known that if you provide confidentiality, you get a slightly better rate of response. So NORC went to self-administered tests. The problem there is with error. You can`t follow up a question to see if the answer was accurate or zero in on it to get more information.”
Determined to profit from past mistakes, the U. of C. team resolved to use a scrupulously randomized sample. They would also strike a balance between face-to-face interviewing and self-administered testing, creating a questionnaire that was part open interview, part self-test.
The idea, as Laumann says, was to create a ”comfort zone,” not only for the test subject but for the 100 or so professional NORC interviewers who would be actually administering the survey coast to coast. These interviewers, most of them women of late middle age-the ”blue-rinse crowd,” as one of the researchers puts it-were expected to have their hands full asking extremely blunt questions of total strangers about subjects that might make both parties uneasy.
In designing the voluminous survey, the team drew on both the previous experience of sex researchers and techniques used by sex therapists. It also used focus groups and cognitive interviews to evaluate the questioning format. In the focus groups, a handful of people from a particular population, say, blacks, were asked how they thought their peers might respond to hypothetical questions. In cognitive interviews, people were asked questions about sex using scientific terms and then vernacular terms, to determine how to refer to various acts. The goal was to see whether people reacted to ”gonorrhea”
better than ”the clap,” for example.
A set of neutral, but not overly technical, terms were finally adopted.
”Oral sex,” for instance, was preferred over both the dictionary and street terms for the practice.
The questionnaire, designed to take an average of 90 minutes, does not cover everything. ”We could only touch on certain things in that length of time. Other things await a future study,” says Stuart Michaels, a sociologist recruited by the team because of his expertise in interpreting raw data and because he is gay and could supply needed advice on reaching the homosexual community. By comparison, Kinsey`s questionnaire took two hours.
The landscape the survey does cover, however, is impressive. The risk of AIDS, of course, runs through it like a symphonic theme. There are many questions relating to condom use, drug use and passive anal sex-considered the primary way the virus is transmitted.
Questions also abound regarding high-risk behaviors, such as visiting prostitutes, which, if the annual NORC survey is any guide, is indulged in by less than 1 percent of the public. ”It would be extremely valuable to find out if these rather rare behaviors are more prevalent in certain target groups, so there might be pools of people where you would have rapid transmission of AIDS,” Laumann says.
One key, and troubling, population are men who report having 20 or more partners a year. According to the GSS survey, the group represents only 1 percent of American males. Yet that still amounts to 250,000 men. Computer projections suggest that this group may have had sexual relations with as many as seven million women in the past year-almost 7 percent of the adult female population.
”That`s an incredible number,” Laumann marvels. ”Seven million American women may have been exposed to their partner`s high-risk behavior. Since most women who admit to multiple partners say they have had maybe three or four partners in the last year, that means one can have relatively modest habits and still be very vulnerable.”
While the survey is AIDS-weighted, it proceeds to expand into many other areas, some dealing with public-health issues, some not. It liberally probes into people`s past experience with child sexual abuse, forced sex, sexual harassment on the job, other sexually transmitted diseases, infertility and abortions.
At various points, it also gets down to the nitty-gritty of sexual preferences and attitudes. ”On average,” it asks at one point, ”in the past 12 months how often did you masturbate?” At another point, it prompts: ”Have you ever had group sex?” and ”On the average, how often do you think about sex?”
Other questions:
– Where did you last have sex (your home, partner`s home, hotel or motel, car or van, at work, a public place like a park)?
– How long did it last (15 minutes or less, more than 15 but less than 30 minutes, more than 30 minutes, 2 hours or longer)?
– How would you rate each of these activities (in terms of appeal):
watching partner undress, vaginal intercourse, using a dildo or vibrator, passive anal intercourse?
– In the past 12 months did you buy or rent any X-rated movies or videos, go to night clubs with nude or semi-nude dancers, get a professional massage, have your picture taken in the nude?
– What was the main reason you chose to have vaginal intercourse for the first time (affection for partner, peer pressure, curious, wanted to have baby, physical pleasure, under the influence of drugs or alcohol, wedding night)?
– How (did) sex with (partner) make you feel? (satisfied, sad, loved, anxious or worried, wanted or needed, taken care of, scared, thrilled, guilty) ?
There are tricks involved in getting people to answer such questions.
”One trick,” says Stuart Michaels, ”is you don`t say, `Do you masturbate?` You say, `When did you first masturbate?` It puts the burden of denial on them and encourages them to answer.”
”This is less an AIDS study than it is a study of sexuality that is AIDS-relevant,” Gagnon says. ”To do an AIDS study, for example, without asking about sexual networks isn`t useful. Or to fail to ask them whether or not they get pleasure out of sex is a mistake. If they do get pleasure, there are different problems getting them to stop than if they don`t.”
Although the survey omitted quite a bit, it still is quite inclusive.
”We asked about a lot of things on the grounds that we might not get to do it again,” Gagnon says.
Attitudes, he says, are particularly important because of culture`s role in dictating sexuality. ”When kids are born, there is no magic in the sex organs that tell them to get together. It comes from what the culture tells you to do, what is acceptable and what is not.”
Randomizing of the survey was carried out using census tracts. NORC maintains a grid of the entire country, and a computer randomly selects units from that grid that probability dictates will constitute a balance between large urban areas, suburban regions and small rural districts. Some 100 units were chosen, and then the same process winnowed each unit down to neighborhood, street and then block.
At the block level, a NORC worker then went to the scene and physically listed each house or apartment building on that block. Then the computer again selected a household on that block.
”Each household in the nation has an equal probability of being picked,” Stuart Michaels says. ”That`s how you can let a few people speak for everyone.”
The targeted households were first contacted by letter, which outlined the purposes of the survey, particularly its public-health aims. Next, an interviewer followed up with a home visit. It was the interviewer`s job to ask whoever answered the door to enumerate all the people who lived in the household and screen the list according to what is known as a Kish table, which arbitrarily indicates which member of the household to interview for the purpose of randomization. (In one household, for example, the Kish table will direct the interviewer to speak to the third person on the list, at the next household to talk to the fifth person, and so on.)
Ideally, arrangements were then made to conduct an interview with the designated person. Talking to that precise individual was an all-or-nothing affair, because the process of randomizing prohibits switching to other people in the household or another family on the block. If someone categorically refused to be interviewed, the entire census tract had to be discarded.
Obviously, it was very important not to take no for an answer. So important, that Laumann, Robert Michael, Gagnon and even Laumann`s physician wife became involved in trying by long distance to personally change the minds of those who refused, which drove the cost of convincing respondents up to $350 a subject. The selling point was always the importance of fighting AIDS. Attempts to cajole people led to some humorous situations. ”We talked to a podiatrist who seemed sort of interested in doing the survey,” Robert Michael says. ”The interviewer then spoke to his wife, who categorically said he didn`t want to do it. It was clear that it was SHE who didn`t want him doing it. So we tried to get him at work and it turned out that his secretary, who answered the phone, was his wife. We never did get him.”
Says Stuart Michaels, ”It was reassuring, though, that the rejections themselves had a random quality.”
Amazingly, in that test subjects had only the interviewers` word that their names would be destroyed after their answers were fed into the computer (”We`ve already done it,” Laumann says), the response rate was huge. No less than 80 percent of those asked agreed to participate.
”It`s incredible,” Robert Michael says. ”It`s better than we do at NORC on surveys about nuclear arms and political parties. Here were people being asked cold, at their front door, to answer all these intimate questions. It`s interesting that only 4 to 5 percent of the respondents refused to answer how many partners they had had, whereas 10 percent failed to answer the question on family income. Apparently people are more open about sex than they are about how much money they make.”
One of the reasons the response rate was so high was the effectiveness of the interviewers, who were flown in for a four-day training seminar last February at the Allerton Hotel. At one point, the interviewers were told to generate all the synonyms they could think of, slang or otherwise, for words like penis and intercourse. It was in the interest of creating the ”comfort zone,” the all-important relaxed attitude with the subject of sex that they needed to have in order to carry out the interviews.
”Any indication of embarrassment on the part of the interviewer might cause the subject to feel embarrassed, too, and they might clam up,” Stuart Michaels says.
”I`ll have to tell you,” Laumann recalls, ”it was kind of funny seeing these older ladies at blackboards writing all these words out.”
A lighthearted attitude has permeated the research team`s efforts. They do not seem immune to the poke-in-the-ribs side of sex that the rest of us bring to the subject. Double-entendres are frequent during discussions, and no one on the team seems constrained by professionalism not to laugh.
At one point, one of the researchers was asked why the survey did not ask about sex with animals, as the Kinsey survey had. He responded: ”Well, you have to remember, he was from Indiana.” The remark engendered sustained laughter among all parties-none of whom, apparently, was from Indiana.
The humor masks the seriousness of the project and the looming shadow of AIDS. There are doubts whether the survey`s data will be make a material difference in the disease, since if the projected figure of 4 percent homosexuality holds, there should have been no more than 140 or so gays in the sample-a small group on which to base a study of behavior. Nevertheless, Stuart Michaels believes it will help.
”Up to now, most of our behavior estimates were based on the experience of AIDS victims, and since it takes up to 10 years to develop the disease, looking at them is looking a decade into the past,” he says. ”But this data will no doubt show that while most people don`t have a large number of partners in their lifetime, they have many partners at certain times in their life-usually before and after relationships or when they are very young. That`s whom we have to aim at.
”This study will also get at people not reached by studies of openly gay men,” Michaels says. ”Think about the closet-y married gay men out there who never go to bars and do not consider themselves gay. These guys will get picked up by our study.”
The research team`s attitude appears to be ”all`s well that end`s well.” If the findings are useful, it will make all the hardship of running the congressional gantlet bearable.
”Kinsey was lucky,” Gagnon points out. ”He was working in the backwaters of science. He did most of his interviews from 1941 to 1946, when everyone was caught up in the war, and the mass media were no factor. You can`t do anything anymore without attracting the media, but Kinsey was protected. Nobody paid attention to this crazy professor interviewing PTA ladies about their sex lives until he was all done.
”But what happened after Kinsey is startling,” Gagnon notes. ”The figures got crystallized, and there was no follow-up to speak of. It`s like the way some people tell their kids about sex. They ask you a question about sex when they are 4, and you answer it. And then you hope they won`t ever ask again.
”In some ways, that was our collective attitude. We had asked our question on sex, and it was time for the subject to go away.”
