FOCUS ON RESEARCH Tell Me About Your Sex Life

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Sexual Behavior
T
FOCUS ON RESEARCH
he first extensive studies of sexual
behavior in the United States were comTell Me About Your Sex Life
pleted in the 1950s and 1960s by Alfred
Kinsey (Kinsey, Pomeroy, & Martin, 1948;
Kinsey et al., 1953) and by William Masters and Virginia Johnson (1966). In the Kinsey studies, volunteers were asked about their sexual practices, whereas Masters and
Johnson actually recorded volunteers’ physiological responses during natural or artificial sexual stimulation in a laboratory. Together, these pioneering studies broke new
ground in the exploration of human sexuality. However, the people who volunteered
for them were probably not a representative sample of the adult population. So the
results, and the conclusions drawn from them, might not apply to people in general.
Further, the data are now so old that they may not reflect sexual practices today. Unfortunately, the results of more recent surveys, such as reader polls in Cosmopolitan and
other magazines, are also flawed by the use of unrepresentative samples (Davis & Smith,
1990).
■ What was the researchers’ question?
Is it possible to gather data about sexual behavior that are more representative and
therefore more applicable to people in general? A team of researchers at the University
of Chicago believe it is, so they undertook the National Health and Social Life Survey,
the first extensive survey of sexual behavior in the United States since the Kinsey studies (Laumann et al., 1994).
■ How did the researchers answer the question?
This survey included important design features that had been neglected in most other
surveys of sexual behavior. First, the study did not depend on self-selected volunteers.
The researchers sought out a particular sample of 3,432 people, ranging in age from
eighteen to fifty-nine. Second, the sample was carefully constructed so as to reflect the
sociocultural diversity of the U.S. population in terms of gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, geographical location, and the like. Third, unlike previous mail-in surveys, the Chicago study was based on face-to-face interviews. This approach made it
easier to ensure that the participants understood each question and allowed them to
explain their responses. To encourage honesty, the researchers allowed participants to
answer some of the survey’s questions anonymously by placing written responses in a
sealed envelope.
■ What did the researchers find?
For one thing, the researchers found that people in the United States have sex less often
and with fewer partners than many had assumed. For most, sex occurs about once a
week, and only with the partner with whom they share a stable relationship. About a
third of the participants reported having had sex only a few times, or not at all, in the
preceding year. And, in contrast to various celebrities’ splashy tales of dozens, even hundreds, of sexual partners per year, the average male survey participant had had only six
sexual partners in his entire life. The average female respondent reported a lifetime total
of two. Further, the survey data suggested that people in committed, one-partner relationships had the most frequent and the most satisfying sex. And, although a wide variety of specific sexual practices were reported, the overwhelming majority of heterosexual couples said they tend to engage mainly in penis-vagina intercourse.
■ What do the results mean?
The Chicago survey challenges some of the cultural and media images of sexuality in
the United States. In particular, it suggests that people in the United States may be more
sexually conservative than one might think on the basis of magazine reader polls and
the testimony of guests on daytime talk shows.