David M. Buss

Part two of my critique of the new sex study everybody is talking about! Part one is here .

Yesterday I wrote about my methodological concerns regarding the study by Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss, "Why Humans Have Sex," published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Today I'm looking at the reasons themselves and discussing some of the conclusions they drew, and some of the conclusions I'd draw looking at the same data.

First of all, I want to dispense with the notion that there were 237 reasons. Quantifying things is an important part of scientific research, of course, and coding data (fitting responses into categories, etc.) is a process that can never be wholly objective. (Somebody at least has to create the categories!) In this case, my criticism arises because the authors indicate that they whittled 715 initial "reasons" down to 237 by eliminating or merging responses that were "too similar" to other responses. That, they claim, produced a list of 237 "distinct reasons".

That should probably be the title of the new study by Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss of University of Texas at Austin (PDF).

The study is an important one because it does begin to explore people's conscious, expressed motivations for having sex, a subject that has been largely ignored or taken for granted in the past. We know much more about what kinds of sex people have than we do about why they have it (or why they think they have it).

And when I read the New York Times article about the study and saw that there was such a wide range of reasons people gave, I was excited: it seemed that the researchers were breaking open some interesting ground and finding lots of diversity.