The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States

I am not a person of scientific stature or training. I am a relatively skeptical person. The writers of this piece of work describe the problems that ran with the initial setting up of the survey, political/religious issues that influenced the survey among other items. The survey renders their own faults in reccomending further work in specific populations. You have to read the book to learn about which populations were not represented. It is still a fairly broad look at what happens in surveys on this topic among others. We must remember...All people lie about Sex. I still believe that this book does open some interesting door for conversation on sex and surveys.

This book is a must-have for any social scientist interested in sexual behavior in the U.S. The writing is clear, and until enough research is published using some of the other more recent samples (i.e. the Add Health), there are literally no other researchers with data of this quality. However, there are some problems. With a sample of only 4,000 or so, there are many smaller groups which are featured in chapters of their own, but for which there were only a few hundred participants. Specifically, the chapter about homosexuality must be taken with a grain of salt. Additionally, the analytical techniques used were often rather simple, rarely more complex than a cross-tab, and more advanced approaches may have been suitable in some circumstances. Despite these shortcomings, this is a remarkably useful text, and extremely easy to read for research of its level of complexity.

We have adopted this title as a textbook for our Social Aspect of Human Sexuality course. In addition to our sexuality course, I use data from The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States for my courses in Social Statistics and Research Methods. I note the importance of employing random sampling by contrasting this data to data collected found in Shere Hite's The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality (#06963). The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States is clearly a scholarly book. The authors also published a volume for the general public entitled: Sex in America: A Definitive Survey. This title includes nearly the same information. However, it is much more readable, but doesn't included all the scholarly details.At this point in time, it is not likely that readers can find a more comprehensive study on human sexuality.