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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sexual Preference (book) | 6/14 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Preference_(book) | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T08:55:27.778790+00:00 | kb-cron |
== Reception ==
=== Mainstream media === Prior to its publication, Jane E. Brody wrote in The New York Times that Sexual Preference was likely to cause controversy because of its findings and its reliance on path analysis and its subjects' memories. Brody noted that path analysis could be misused and that it "can only explore existing notions, not create new ones." According to Brody, Bell said that he expected the study to be condemned by both "radical gays" and psychoanalysts, the psychologist John Paul De Cecco questioned the "theoretical basis" of Sexual Preference and the reliability and validity of relying on recollections of childhood, and the psychoanalyst Irving Bieber described Bell et al.′s findings as inconsistent with his clinical experience. Sexual Preference attracted considerable media attention in 1981, receiving positive reviews from the historian Paul Robinson in Psychology Today and Richard P. Halgin in Library Journal, a negative review from the sociologist John Gagnon in The New York Times, a notice in Newsweek, and a discussion in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which focused on the controversy surrounding the book. The following year, the book received a negative review from Michael Ignatieff in the London Review of Books. The work was faulted for the questionable representativeness of its sample of homosexuals, but those who reviewed it positively praised it for the sophistication of its path analysis. Robinson suggested that Bell et al. might have misidentified gender nonconformity as a cause of homosexuality, rather than as one of its expressions, but nevertheless found Sexual Preference to be a "superb" book that answered the question of how people become heterosexual or homosexual better than any previous study, disqualified most previous answers, and was comparable to Alfred Kinsey's best work. He maintained that their study's empirical foundation and path analysis gave Bell et al.′s findings "unprecedented trustworthiness". Robinson credited Bell et al. with documenting the "intellectual poverty" of psychoanalytic hypotheses about homosexuality. He lamented that unlike Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), which gained popular attention, Sexual Preference "seems destined for academic oblivion." Halgin wrote that the book would be considered a landmark publication in sexology, and was more scientifically rigorous than most research in the field, but that it was also likely to create controversy. Gagnon considered Sexual Preference a politically motivated study that would inevitably be received as a political and moral statement. He noted that its authors' conclusion that the lack of correlation between sexual orientation and early family experience means that the development of heterosexuality and homosexuality must be based on a biological predisposition was controversial. He criticized their use of path analysis, arguing that it over-emphasized differences between heterosexual and homosexual patterns of development. He also wrote that their reliance on adult recall of early childhood feeling was inconsistent with all recent research on memory, suggesting that respondents' answers to the vague and general questions employed in the study might reflect a subsequent reconstruction of events rather than an accurate recall of childhood. He also criticized their decision to group together "the respondents' observations relating to certain behaviors and attitudes", and their failure to provide new biological evidence. Ignatieff wrote that even if Bell et al.′s conclusion that family upbringing and factors such as labeling have little measurable effect on adult sexual orientation was correct it would not justify their additional claim that homosexuality is biologically innate, and that they had not resolved the question of how responsible people are for their sexual orientation. In 2002, The New York Times quoted the historian and gay rights activist Martin Duberman as saying that Sexual Preference resulted from "the most ambitious study of male homosexuality ever attempted", and that together with Homosexualities it helped to "refuted a large number of previous studies" identifying gay men as "social misfits".