Kinsey, Alfred
Kinsey, Alfred (1894–1956)A zoologist who completed the first major large-scale social research into the sexual behaviour of men and women in North America. The findings, based on a sample of 18000 interviews (nearly half of which Kinsey conducted himself), were published as Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female in 1953. Through the founding of the Kinsey Institute of Sex Research in Bloomington, Indiana, he did much to establish the credibility of such research. His findings were controversial, showing for example that 4 per cent of men in his sample were exclusively homosexual, and a third of men had engaged in homosexual acts. His findings have had an important cultural impact, discussed by P. Robinson in The Modernization of Sex (1976).
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