Kinsey, Alfred (1892–1956)

Alfred Kinsey was not by training a sociologist, but a biologist (specializing in the taxonomy of gall wasps) at Indiana University, Bloomington. Believing there was a need for a course about marriage and sexual behavior, in 1938 he was concerned to find little data on which to base such study. According to one small study at that time, some 96 percent of young Americans did not know the word masturbation and many thought it was a form of insanity. In general there was widespread ignorance, and he decided to conduct his own study of the sexual behavior of the American female and male during the 1930s to 1950s – most prominently asThe Sexual Behavior of the Human Male(1948) andThe Sexual Behavior of the Human Female(1953), and after his death, less well‐known studies such asSex Offenders(1965). Ultimately providing some 18,000 life stories of individuals (many of whom he interviewed himself), it was largely taxonomic – a “social book keeping” exercise showing who does what with whom, where, when, and how often. Using the interviews, he and his colleagues asked around 300 questions. When published, his work was a large statistical and scientific study, but curiously it became a national bestseller and played a prominent role in shaping US cultural life in the later part of the twentieth century (Reumann 2005).