Several friends have asked me about the Alfred Kinsey movie because I know the subject well. I was involved with the National Sex Forum for more than a decade, helped start the San Francisco Sex Information Hotline and was on the Board of SIECUS a New York sex education group.
I knew Wardell Pomeroy, Kinsey’s co-author and close ally. I don’t know if the movie captures Kinsey, his biography does.
Two things the movie does not capture is the fact that Kinsey died of heartbreak over the end of funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the resultant end to his beloved research. The second is something that few people know, that the Kinsey research methodology was superb. The best possible methodology.
Kinsey researchers used a coded questionnaire page, with all answers coded so that only Kinsey trained researchers could read the results. Real confidentiality.
I may be one of the few people alive that can verify this last statement about the “best possible methodology.”
In 1985 I debated Dr. Peter Sherrill, who later became one of my closest friends, over the issue of classic random sample versus a Kinsey 100% group sample. The debate was public, in a California Public Utilities Commission meeting room. I was on one end of a ten-foot table representing Public Advocates and Peter was at the other end representing Field Research and Pacific Bell.
Two experts on survey research brought together to resolve a thorny issue of public concern.
In 1984, some Mexican labor activists reported to Robert Gnaizda (Public Advocates) that farm workers in Salinas had monthly phone bills of $32, with every feature from call forwarding to three-way calling. None of these farm workers could speak English.
Gnaizda phoned around the state and found that the same phenomenon was occurring in Chinese and Vietnamese communities.
What was happening was later proved in utility hearings. Pacific Bell sales people, who had strong prize incentives for signing up customers, would sign up a customer for the maximum phone package of $32 anytime the sales person reached a person who didn’t speak English. Don’t speak English … you just bought $32 a month of technical phone services.
The public debate between Dr. Sherrill and I was over the issue of measuring the extent of the marketing abuse damage. How many people had been signed up for services without knowing what was going on?
Dr. Sherrill made the argument that classic random phone sampling with multi-lingual interviewers would find the correct answer. I argued that the most reliable method would be a 100% in-person sample of ethnic groups. The survey money would be paid to the ethnic organizations for 100% turnout and participation of their members. This is the Kinsey sampling method.
We were both persuasive or maybe we both weren’t. Pacific Bell was ordered to do both kinds of sampling to find how many people had been cheated and how much money had been falsely taken from non-English speakers.
Dr. Sherrill (Peter) and I designed and agreed upon the questionnaire.
The day arrived when the computer printouts from both surveys were ready. Peter and I sat down in a Corey Canapary & Galanis Research office (they had done my ethnic group survey) near Union Square. We looked at the responses to the first question. Then the second question, then all the questions on the first page, then we rapidly went through the entire printout.
The answers were the same from the two distinctly different survey methods. I don’t mean the same in a statistical sense, I mean the same in the sense of being one or two points different on every single question.
Peter and I were stunned. As professionals we reverted to the term “robust data” meaning the truth will out regardless of the method. But we were still stunned at the nearly identical outcomes.
Back to the movie about Kinsey. This research in 1985 was probably the most careful, thorough and reliable proof that the Kinsey research method was excellent. Superb.
Peter and my research results were never publish in a survey research journal.
Oh yes, Pacific Bell had to pay $60 million in refunds and $16 million in penalties.