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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sexual Preference (book) | 9/14 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Preference_(book) | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T08:55:27.778790+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Scientific and academic journals, 1983–1986 === Cheryl L. Gillespie gave Sexual Preference a mixed review in Family Relations. She commended Bell et al. for using a sophisticated methodology and trying to avoid "poorly designed measures and biased interpretation of data". Nevertheless, she found their methodology and interpretation of data open to question, writing that although their San Francisco Bay Area sample was arguably non-representative, they wrote as though the study was representative of the larger population, that they did not sufficiently explore the issue of bias in their subjects' self-reports, which might have been motivated by the subjects' ideology or desire to please the researchers by telling them what they thought they wanted to hear, and that they relegated the fact that respondents who had been exposed to scientific information regarding homosexuality were more likely to characterize their parents in accord with psychoanalytic models of emotionally absent fathers and domineering mothers to a footnote. She also suggested that readers might find Sexual Preference boring. Thomas Ford Hoult argued in the Journal of Homosexuality that Bell et al.′s conclusion that childhood gender nonconformity and adult sexual orientation have a biological basis is a legitimate hypothesis, but one that it is not confirmed by their failure to find a direct connection between sexual orientation and parent-child interaction. Jeanne Marecek gave Sexual Preference a negative review in Sex Roles, writing that it was tedious and succeeded well neither as a popular book nor as a scientific treatment of its topic. She maintained that it lacked "methodological detail", and that its true focus was homosexuality rather than sexual preference generally. She believed that there were many problems with "the premises and the execution" of the study, writing that its authors neither broke "new theoretical ground" nor offered "a critical reading of old theories" and ignored questions such as "how and why adults change their sexual preference, what meanings individuals ascribe to their sexuality, and how social context contributes to stability or change in sexual preference". In her view, other problems included their failure to critically examine "the accuracy of the retrospective memories" of their respondents and willingness to take their answers to questions at face value. She concluded that they must have been disappointed by the results of their path analyses since, "Very few of the respondents' reported early experiences were related to the emergence of homosexuality." She disagreed with their focus on theories relating homosexuality to childhood experience and their conclusion that "sexual preference is dictated by developmental experiences", and wrote that they seemed politically conservative despite presenting themselves as liberals. The psychoanalyst Gerard J. M. van den Aardweg criticized Bell et al.′s interpretation of their data in the American Journal of Psychotherapy. He argued that too many studies suggest that domineering mothers play a role in the development of male homosexuality for their conclusion that mothers have at most a weak influence on the development of their sons' sexual orientation to be readily acceptable, that all questionnaire studies have inherent limitations, and that their data are inferior to those collected over time by psychotherapists. He suggested that homosexuals might give defensive answers due to not wanting to be labelled abnormal, that Bell et al.′s data were of poor quality, since too few questions about parental behavior had been asked and open-ended questions yielded superficial answers, and that it was unjustified to conclude that parents must have only a small influence on the development of their children's sexual orientation simply because that influence did not reveal itself clearly. He accused Bell et al. of admitting the limitations of path analysis only to then ignore those limitations, arguing that the technique had "numerous dubious premises" and that they used it in a way that was open to technical objections such as its failure to "distinguish between different types of psychodynamic development to homosexuality". He considered them mistaken to treat their variables as isolated items, rather than in combination with each other. He also found the studies they cited as evidence that homosexuality might have a hormonal basis unconvincing. The psychologists Paul H. Van Wyk and Chrisann S. Geist wrote in the Archives of Sexual Behavior that Bell et al. question a scientific consensus, established by researchers such as the psychologists Heino Meyer-Bahlburg and John Money, that biological factors have at most only a predisposing influence on the development of sexual orientation. Using their subject pool, which consisted of people interviewed between 1938 and 1963, they produced similar results. However they suggested that some significant differences could have been partly a result of the different methodology employed. In their view, the most important difference was that their outcome variable was based only on "overt behavior" whereas that of Bell et al. "is an average of subjective preference and overt behavior." They noted that Bell et al. "excluded from their model variables that did not apply to everyone in their sample", which made it impossible to judge the effects of "idiosyncratic and unique sexual and nonsexual experiences". The philosopher Michael Ruse credited Bell et al. with avoiding the problems of earlier studies, such as Bieber et al.′s Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals (1962), in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.