A prime challenge to the sexological model lies in taking on how its penchant for looking for universal principles has led us to ignore how sexual lives are different depending on social circumstances. Variables af fecting sexual values and scripts such as class, age, socio-economic situa tion, religion, ethnicity, and assimilation are not prominent in most sex research, usually because the samples are too homogeneous and the vari ables are not thought interesting when universal principles were presum ably under study. Relegating qualitative information to non-science, as in Kinsey’s affirmation of statistical methods and disdain for the sexuality ma
terials in Table 1, has further hobbled our efforts to understand the expe riences of people in different social circumstances.
In outcome research on sexual dysfunction treatment, for example, researchers exclude couples who have complicating problems of health or employment difficulties in order to be able to draw valid conclusions about the actual impact of one type of treatment or another. If the sample were large enough (which it rarely is or realistically can be), couples with such problems would be included, and the impact of such factors on treatment outcome could be quantitatively assessed. But, looking more deeply, what would be the sex researcher’s goal in such research? Probably it would be to ascertain the best possible method. But is that logical in terms of sexuality? Are such universalizations appropriate for couples, for sexuality, for service delivery realities, and so forth? It seems that positivistic assumptions about how the world is organized have pervaded all aspects of sex research, in ways we are only beginning to think about.