Wednesday, May 10, 2006

• are 10% of the population really gay?????

  the kinsey report

  Did you know that Kinsey used unscientific methods for his research on human sexuality? Did you know that his statistics are skewed? Well they are. He originally studied moths. The way that one would do this is basically one studies any specimens that one could catch and base the assumptions about the entire species on that sample. This works with moths because one moth is usually like any other. The problem with Kinsey's human research is that he applied the same basic sampling practices. He talked to any person that was willing to talk about their sexuality. The key word is willing. His researched is skewed because he was working in the 50's. In the 50's the only people willing to talk about their sexuality were the people that were already comfortable with it or were already outsiders or part of the sexually marginalized community. There for Kinsey did not do a randomized study. He studied the fringes of the greater community. Kinsey's sampling tactics, while they worked in the animal world, did not work in the human aspect because every person is different. They didn't work because one person, or even a hundred people, does not represent the community as a whole when they are not picked at random. There for because Kinsey didn't randomly select the people that he interviewed and only interviewed people willing to come to him, he came up with skewed statistics.

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