Sex In America
Essay by 24 • March 15, 2011 • 601 Words (3 Pages) • 1,313 Views
Sex in America
Andrew Brown
The Author's main methodological argument is sexual behavior of the average American in society is rarely studied. The scientific findings have been left with myths and half truths. In the article they reference Masters and Johnson's book Human Sexual Response. The theme of their book is can sexuality be understand without the benefit of objective, scientific analysis? The author was committed to using scientific analysis to understand sexual behavior despite past failure.
Their argument in this article is the lack of reliable help they could do for their research. They show several examples that they came across such as lack of government funding and lack of private funding. Scientific research on sex in America was considered a threat to society's morality. Senior scientists discouraged their students to engage in this research because it could affect their career. The result of these problems led to sex research being poorly funded and disdained.
The information that social scientists needed for sex research had to go beyond personal stories, flawed interviews, and bad surveys. Their goal and philosophical approach was to give people a different point of view about sexuality and reveal the social issues that affect sexual behavior in society.
The methodological study is important because this article shows you how complex some subjects are for research methods. If you applied your research methods to sex in America, it would be complicated because of so many factors you have to consider. A majority of people don't feel comfortable talking about their sex life in America and if you are a researcher your main goal is accurate data. If people are not honest about their sex life, then your research can be useless on the subject. This is a perfect article for this methods course because it shows that you can't rely on your own opinion and personal stories for reliable data.
The difficulty of this article challenges you to think of a method that could work for the
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