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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sexual Preference (book) | 14/14 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Preference_(book) | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T08:55:27.778790+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Other evaluations, 1998–present === The anthropologist Gilbert Herdt argued that Sexual Preference, like the Kinsey scale, places "too much emphasis upon discrete acts of sex and not enough stress upon the cultural context and total developmental outcomes to which those acts are related." He called the study a "quantitative sociological" survey of homosexuality that decontextualizes "the culture and lives at issue", arguing that all developmental changes need to be viewed in the context of social structure. Stein described Sexual Preference as one of the most detailed and frequently cited retrospective studies relating to sexual orientation. In his view, while the study has been criticized on various grounds, including that all of its subjects were living in San Francisco, arguably an atypical place with respect to the sexual orientation of its inhabitants, Bell et al.′s conclusions about theories attributing sexual orientation to the effects of experience have been accepted and confirmed. He observed that many other studies have been conducted on childhood gender nonconformity partly because of Bell et al.′s findings relating it to homosexuality. The psychologists Stanton L. Jones and Mark Yarhouse described Sexual Preference as a famous study. They maintained that because Bell et al.′s data suggest that mothers have only a weak influence on the development of homosexuality their work is "sometimes thought of as the study that discredited the psychoanalytic theory." However, they observed that in Bell et al.′s sample "considerably more homosexual males reported fathers who were detached or not affectionate than did heterosexual men", and concluded that, "While clearly not providing definitive support for the psychoanalytic hypothesis, this study is surely not the refutation of that hypothesis that it is sometimes supposed to be." The historian Laurie Guy observed that the type of evidence on which Sexual Preference relied, adult recollection of childhood, had been criticized by Gagnon and Simon as long ago as 1973. He argued that gay rights organizations in New Zealand over-relied upon the work in the debate that preceded the passage of the Homosexual Law Reform Act 1986, writing that while important, it was only one study, and as such did not support gay rights activist claims that "all evidence" shows that sexual orientation is fixed early in life. Judith A. Allen and her co-authors wrote that Sexual Preference, like Homosexualities, abandoned Kinsey's understanding of human sexuality by focusing on homosexual people rather than homosexual behavior and rejecting the idea that categorizing people as homosexual was problematic.
=== Position of the American Psychological Association === The American Psychological Association, in "Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation", a document released in 2009, credited Bell et al. and other authors with discrediting theories claiming that sexual orientation is caused by family dynamics or trauma.
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=== Bibliography ===
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Online articles