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Special Report: Sexuality and Gender
of research subjects for the purposes of study relatively easy: compare pregnant women with other, non-pregnant women. But how can researchers compare, say, “gay” men to “straight” men in a single study, or across a range of studies, without mutually exclusive and exhaustive definitions of the terms “gay” and “straight”?
To increase precision, some researchers categorize concepts associated with human sexuality along a continuum or scale according to variations in pervasiveness, prominence, or intensity. Some scales focus on both intensity and the objects of sexual desire. Among the most familiar and widely used is the Kinsey scale, developed in the 1940s to classify sexual desires and orientations using purportedly measurable criteria. People are asked to choose one of the following options:
0 – Exclusively heterosexual
1 – Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual
2 – Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual
3 – Equally heterosexual and homosexual
4 – Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual
5 – Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual
6 – Exclusively homosexual21
But there are considerable limitations to this approach. In principle, measurements of this sort are valuable for social science research. They can be used, for example, in empirical tests such as the classic “t-test,” which helps researchers measure statistically meaningful differences between data sets. Many measurements in social science, however, are “ordinal,” meaning that variables are rank-ordered along a single, one-dimensional continuum but are not intrinsically significant beyond that. In the case of the Kinsey scale, this situation is even worse, because it measures the self-identification of individuals, while leaving unclear whether the values they report all refer to the same aspect of
sexuality—different people may understand the terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual” to refer to feelings of attraction, or to arousal, or to fantasies, or to behavior, or to any combination of these. The ambiguity of the terms severely limits the use of the Kinsey scale as an ordinal measurement that gives a rank order to variables along a single, one-
dimensional continuum. So it is not clear that this scale helps researchers to make even rudimentary classifications among the relevant groups using qualitative criteria, much less to rank-order variables or conduct controlled experiments.
22 ~ The New Atlantis