SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN MARRIAGE
There are few studies of sexual behavior in marriage which meet even minimal criteria for scientific acceptability. The most important attempts to get a representative picture of sexual behavior in the United States were those of Kinsey and others. Two more recent large-scale surveys (Hunt; Tavris and Sadd) have looked at marital sexual behavior, and both have reported remarkable changes in the thirty years since Kinsey and his colleagues collected their data. We shall consider the nature of each of these studies as they pertain to marital sex.
The Kinsey studies consist of samples of 5,300 males and 5,940 females of a wide range of ages, educational levels, and geographical distribution, and are based on data collected in structured interviews and statistically analyzed to reveal what Gagnon called social bookkeeping: who does what with whom, how, and how often. Each of the volumes contains a chapter on marital intercourse, as well as numerous references to it throughout the books. The studies do not claim to be representative, since some groups in the population are under-represented (e.g., less educated and rural groups) or not represented at all (e.g., blacks). Besides methodological problems in the studies, we can be sure that much of the data are now obsolete. Nevertheless, they do provide a framework for sexual behavior and a reference for comparison with later studies.
The Hunt study, Sexual Behavior in the 1970s, was based on a sample of 982 males and 1,044 females, supposedly representative of the adult U. S. population in such variables as race, marital status, education, occupation, and urban-rural background. The data for the statistical analyses were gathered by self-administered questionnaires; an additional sample of 100 males and 100 females were interviewed in depth for the book’s narrative material. The intention was to collect data paralleling that of Kinsey’s so as to compare his sample with the present generation. The study does not claim to be truly representative of the American population. One problem is that only one in five of those persons originally contacted agreed to participate. Another is that the material was presented in Playboy magazine and in book-form (Hunt) for the general public, and the analyses are not nearly as comprehensive or detailed as Kinsey’s. Even so, despite shortcomings of the data presentation, it is a study of adult sexual behavior in our society, it looks at many of the same variables that Kinsey used, and it, too, has a chapter on marital sex.
The third study, by Tavris and Sadd (1977), is based on a sample of 2,278 married women, whose questionnaire responses were scientifically selected from 100,000 such responses by women readers of Redbook magazine. The sample was claimed to be “virtually parallel” to the national distribution of married women in geographical area, religious belief, and percentage who work outside the home. They are, however, younger, better educated, and more affluent than are married women in general.
The problem in discussing marital sexual behavior, then, is obvious: not enough up-to-date, reliable, methodologically sound data. Despite these limitations, this section will deal with frequency of marital intercourse, coital techniques, orgasm, masturbation, pregnancy, and satisfaction with marital sex.
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