Kiss and Tell

Julia Ericksen studied more than 750 surveys conducted over the past 100 years, and she has concluded that when it comes to sex we don’t want to be left out. [She] believes that sexual surveys provide a way for people to evaluate their behaviour ‘by revealing the private behaviour of others.’
-- Cherry Norton The Independent

This is a thoughtful book about a difficult subject. It is concerned with social scientific attempts to use surveys to study the sexual behavior of Americans—adolescents and adults, men and women—during the last century. The authors have made an exhaustive search for such studies, describe the main ones in detail, set the studies in their political and social context, and examine the political difficulties that recent surveys in particular have encountered.
-- Martin Bulmer American Journal of Sociology

Kiss and Tell provides a detailed narrative of the principal foci of sex surveys throughout the twentieth century: through the first stilted promotions of erotically efficient marital sex to the wider ranging and more reflexive surveys of young people in the 1970s… The book would serve well as a resource for students and scholars of North American sexual culture.
-- Sexualities

Ericksen and Steffen present a well-written summary of sex surveys in the US from 1898 to the late 1990s. Using concepts from the sociology of knowledge, the authors assert that studies about sexual behavior and attitudes both reflected and affected the contemporary culture in which the surveys were conducted. They describe the political, funding, and public opinion problems faced by researchers on sexuality, emphasizing especially how the topics examined, phrasing of the questions asked, nonrandomness of the samples used, and interpretation of the data shaped the results. Starting with early, usually puritanical studies presented to limited professional audiences and moving to later, frequently antipuritanical research widely publicized by the media, the authors show how the surveys were often used by nonresearchers to further political, religious, and social agendas.
-- R. W. Smith Choice

Going far beyond a simple laundry list [of sex surveys], Kiss and Tell elaborates at length on the assumptions, agendas, and viewpoints implicit in each survey and presents trends in surveys by topic and decade. The book shows how fears that private behavior would affect the public good influenced how ‘crises’ were defined and what questions were asked.
-- Library Journal