After the interview, the team also asked for written responses to selected questions-about masturbation, for instance-that were to be entombed in a sealed envelope, a setup that might have telegraphed extra sensitivity and led to underreporting. Laumann wasnвЂ™t perfect: His team conducted a small number of interviews with the subjectвЂ™s partner in the room, reducing the likelihood of truthful answers to certain questions-involving affairs, say, or homosexuality. If the number of respondents was one-fifth KinseyвЂ™s total, it was still a better snapshot of the nation. The researchers scored an impressive 78.6 percent response rate, interviewing a total of 3,342 people. He and his team selected a representative sample of American households, and then tried to interview one adult between the ages of 18 and 59 in each of them. Most importantly, in terms of the development of the field, Laumann used up-to-date, rigorous methods to collect his data. Kinsey may have reassured people that their taboo practices were not so taboo Laumann helped the more conventional among us take comfort that the neighbors werenвЂ™t having all that much fun, either. If Kinsey made people think about the elephant in the master bedroom that at the time no one talked about in public, Laumann reeled us back in from the Madonna sex-is-everywhere idea. More than 80 percent of his interviewees said theyвЂ™d had either one or no sexual partners in the prior year. LaumannвЂ™s work countered the fond image of a national sex party. As writer Katha Pollit quipped in The Nation, вЂњIt isnвЂ™t 10 percent of Americans who are gay, itвЂ™s 10 percent of New Yorkers.вЂќ LaumannвЂ™s adultery number for men was also half the Kinsey figure: Only 25 percent of married men (and roughly 15 percent of married women) reported having had extramarital sex. Among his most famous results, published in 1994: Less than 5 percent of men said that they had had a same-sex sexual experience since the age of 18, half of KinseyвЂ™s 10 percent figure. In the end, conservatives had less to fear from Laumann than from his predecessors. But a smaller, privately funded version proceeded, in part because of the HIV imperative. Thus, Congress withdrew funding for a large-scale survey that Laumann had begun preliminary work on. If, God forbid, a government-sponsored study had echoed KinseyвЂ™s findings, the results would have been hard to dismiss. By this time, conservatives were heading off sex studies, afraid that the results would show high rates of homosexual and premarital sex and so make them seem normal. In the mid-1980s, with the threat of HIV looming, LaumannвЂ™s interest turned to sexual networks and the need for better data on sexual behavior. HeвЂ™s wary of negative press, likes to downplay controversy, and giggles disarmingly over the boring headlines heвЂ™s generated over the years. Laumann is a former provost of the university, a venerable sociologist, and an expert on social networks. It wasnвЂ™t until the early 1990s that sex surveys caught up with statistics, in the work of Edward Laumann of the University of Chicago. Highly publicized surveys in the 1970s from Redbook, Playboy, and others had similar problems. Though Hite tried to include women of many different backgrounds-drawing on the mailing lists of feminist organization, womenвЂ™s magazines, and some religious groups-her overall response rate was low, making it hard to generalize from her numbers. Hite found that 82 percent of women said they masturbated, and of these, вЂњ95 percent could orgasm easily and regularly, whenever they wanted.вЂќ This was in contrast to the stereotype that вЂњwomen are slow to become aroused and are able to orgasm only irregularly.вЂќ In an interview last year looking back on her heyday, Hite said that she trusted her survey respondents because they often told her they took her survey вЂњafter they put their whole family to bed and they were answering on the kitchen table.вЂќ But her results were, if anything, less scientific than KinseyвЂ™s. Researcher Shere Hite is a cultural critic whose 1976 treatise on female sexuality, The Hite Report, became a rallying cry for feminists and an international best seller. The same problem plagued the next wave of sex surveys.

Kinsey scale test with pictures