Word: randomization
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Kinsey thought he'd never get a random sample of people to talk about sex -- and in the inhibited atmosphere of his day he was probably right. He settled for what social scientists call a "sample of convenience," finding volunteers where he could. His numbers were huge -- some 11,000 people -- but selective and self-selected. In later years, mail-in surveys conducted by magazines like Playboy and Redbook and by Shere Hite were still less representative. Even Masters and Johnson called their own classic study "admittedly prejudiced...
...Chicago team avoided this trap. Working with the school's National Opinion Research Center (NORC), the team began by using computers to select addresses at random. Then they chose which member of the household to interview, again at random. Next they rigorously trained a cadre of 220 interviewers on the delicate art of conducting a frank discussion of sex. "Our feeling was that you could get people to talk about anything if you approach them right," says Edward Laumann, a sociologist at the University of Chicago...
...biologist by training (his expertise was the gall wasp), he compromised science and took his human subjects where he could find them: in boardinghouses, college fraternities, prisons and mental wards. For 14 years he collared hitchhikers who passed through town and quizzed them mercilessly. It was hardly a random cross section...
...dissolution. (He has since remarried.) "I don't talk about it much," he told TIME. "I met my ex-wife when she was my high school math teacher . . . at Baker High School in Columbus, Georgia." Married after his freshman year at Emory University, he says what he calls the "random accident" of their getting together "seemed to make sense at the time. I can't look back badly, from the standpoint that I have two wonderful daughters whom I am very close to and adore and who are wonderful." But Gingrich pointedly dismissed as a "caricature" the "hit job" journalism...
...hype machine for this joint memoir by Mary Matalin and James Carville is racing on overdrive: a love story for the ages set against the drama of the 1992 campaign. But if romance is your primary reason for reading All's Fair: Love, War, and Running for President (Random House and Simon & Schuster; 493 pages; $24), you are doomed to feel like a disgruntled voter fooled again at the ballot...