The family health maintenance demonstration : a controlled long term investigation of family health. Proceedings of a round table at the 1953 Annual Conference of the Milbank Memorial Fund.

  • Milbank Memorial Fund.
Date:
1954
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: The family health maintenance demonstration : a controlled long term investigation of family health. Proceedings of a round table at the 1953 Annual Conference of the Milbank Memorial Fund. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    havior. What did he decide to measure? He choose principally two quantities—the earliest age at which a given kind of sexual be havior was first engaged in and the number of orgasms per week in the various kinds of sexual behavior that he distinguished. These records obviously leave much to be desired as the raw material for a penetrating insight into sexual behavior. Further, the count data which he obtained are certainly subject to bias, and it is hard to say how large the biases are. The limitations of these data are evi dent in the volume on the male, in which many of the most inter esting statements are not based on the tabular data, and it is not clear to the reader on what evidence the statements are based. Nevertheless, in my own opinion, Kinsey’s is the best study of sexual behavior in a mass population that has been carried out and is methodologically greatly superior to previous studies. Moreover, his work is a valuable supplement to the more penetrating and thoughtful studies that have been done by some others, but which have had to depend on a few individual cases, whose representa tiveness is unknown to us. Finally, I would like to mention one piece of advice which is usually given to Scottish boys shortly after they are weaned, at the critical time when father first puts a golf club in the boy’s hands: “Keep your eye on the ball and don’t press.” In a study of this kind, all sorts of suggestions are made for interesting sidelines that might be explored, but if the team is to get anywhere it must con struct a system of priorities as to the tasks that it regards as most essential for its own goals in the study, and it must fight to main tain these priorities against blandishments and outside suggestions, unless and until it has the resources to cope with its main objectives with something to spare for additional studies. And by “don’t press,” I mean this: This kind of study is very expensive: it takes a long time and attracts many visitors. The members of the team may come to feel that they are under pressure to produce results and they may begin to worry when some things inevitably go wrong. It is most important to do anything that can be done to lighten this pressure and encourage team members to be more relaxed. I am sure that the visitors have all been greatly im