AIDS, Sexual Behavior, and Intravenous Drug Use (1989) / Chapter Skim
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Sex Counts: A Methodological Critique of Hite's Women and Love
Sex Counts: A Methodological Critique of Hite's Women and Love
Pages 537-547
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From page 537... ...
Hite reports that 84 percent were not emotionally satisfied with their relationships, that 84 percent of their husbands/lovers frequently responded to what they said with ridicule or condescension, and that 95 percent had faced "emotional and psychological harassment." In contrast Hite found that relations between women and their female friends were warm and emotionally supportive. Hite reports that 87 percent said these friendships were emotionally closer than those with husbands/lovers.
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From page 538... ...
Ensuring respondents of confidentiality and gaining their cooperation for surveys on sensitive topics are challenging tasks, but national probability samples have been carried out on such difficult topics as drug addiction (including urine tests) , homosexual behavior, and alcoholism, to mention only a few.
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From page 539... ...
This type of volunteer respondent is the exact opposite of the randomly selected respondent utilized in standard survey research and even more potentially unrepresentative than the group samples cited above. Response Rates Hite reports that she clistributec3 100,000 questionnaires and oh tained 4,500 responses for a final response rate of 4.5 percent.
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From page 540... ...
xxx: "Most survey research tociay tries to match its samples demographically to the general population in other ways by, for example, weighting responses to conform to the population profile, as Hite doesn't. Hite herself comes close to admitting this directly when she closely echoes Lang's statement: "Most survey research now tries to match its sample demographically to the general population in other ways; for example, by weighting responses to conform to the population profile, somewhat similarly to the methods used here" (p.
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From page 541... ...
Household income is dramatically higher than individual income and would not come close to matching the census figures for women with money income. For example, from the same Census Bureau publication that Hite used, the percentage of households with incomes over $25,000 was 47.6 percent in 1985, compared to the S.5 percent she reported.
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From page 542... ...
With regard to marital status, the most peculiar thing is the strange note that makes inappropriate references to such things as "life expectancy tables" anti "projected divorce rate." It appears that these comments are directed toward the issue of calculating the proportion of marriages that will end in divorce, or some similar matter, and have nothing to do with the simple marital distributions that she is presenting. The next comparison is the percentage of women in the labor force under various marital and child-caring circumstances.
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From page 543... ...
Taking the voluminous and variegated essay material, it is not only possible but likely that one could find whatever results one wanted within the responses. Given the strong ideological positions of the author, it would have taken the greatest care and the most exacting cocling criteria to have avoided subjective and biases!
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From page 544... ...
This style is much more leading and less studiously neutral than open-ended questions usually are, but although atypical, this general style probably does not in itself seriously mold and shape responses. Individual questions pose more serious problems, however.
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From page 545... ...
861~? Other than the statements that 4,500 women answered the questionnaire, that respondents were told they did not have to answer all questions, and that some questions were adcled only after much data tract been collected, nothing is known about how many people answered particular questions.
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From page 546... ...
CONCLUSION Hite's substantive findings about the current state of "women and love" and about such specific matters as the infidelity rate and level of female homosexuality or bisexuality must be considered problematic and questionable because of the methoclology employed. The extreme lack of documentation, the use of nonrandom or volunteer respondents and other suspect methodologies, the vague and contradictory reporting of findings, and the inconsistencies in the statistical comparisons to the U.S.
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From page 547... ...
(1984) Estimating nonresponse bias with temporary refusals.
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