How did his method of sampling create difficulties for his work?
JAMES JONES: No one prior to Kinsey had attempted to amass as much data on human sexuality as he did. Also, sampling theory, or sampling technique – and Kinsey does his work in the 30s and 40s – is really in its infant stage. There’s actually one national survey, so to speak, that I can think of in late 1930s and early 1940s, and then the Gallup people were starting to pioneer that technique at the same time that his Male volume comes out. But the idea of random sampling, which becomes kind of the holy grail of sampling theory later on, is at that point in its infancy and doesn’t have the same kind of cultural authority that it comes to have shortly thereafter. Kinsey always contended that a random sample, while terribly desirable – and he conceded that – was simply not possible because of the kind of research that he did. His argument, simply put, was that too many people are going to decline my invitation to contribute histories, and that declination rate is going to skew my data. So
