White, middle-class volunteers. Typically, college students as well as educated white-collar workers are overrepresented. Ethnic and racial minorities and less-educated individuals are underrepresented.
How much of an effect do nonresponse, self-selection, social desirability bias, and demographic bias have on sex research findings? We cannot say for sure. But as long as some groups of people are underrepresented, we must be cautious in generalizing find ings to the population at large. Thankfully, sex researchers are aware of this problem and have been increasing the diversity of research participants in recent years. However, there is still more work to do in this area. Throughout this textbook, we will highlight areas where more diverse samples are still urgently needed.
Ethical Guidelines for Human Sex Research .
Researchers in sexology, as well as in other fields, share a common commitment to maintaining the well-being, confidentiality, and safety of their human participants.
Detailed lists of ethical guidelines have been prepared by a number of professional organi-zations, including the American Psychological Association (APA), the American Medical Association (AMA), and the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS).
The ethical guidelines require, among other things, that no pressure or coercion be applied to ensure the participation of volunteers in research and that researchers avoid procedures that might cause physical or psychological harm to human participants.
Researchers need to obtain informed consent from participants before conducting a study. Obtaining informed consent involves explaining the general purpose of the study and each participant’s rights as a subject, including the voluntary nature of participation and the potential costs and benefits of participation. Researchers must also respect a participant’s right to refuse to participate at any time during the course of a study. In addition, special steps must be taken to protect the confidentiality of the data and to maintain participants’ anonymity unless they agree to be identified.
Deception in research remains a controversial issue. Some studies would lose their effectiveness if participants knew in advance exactly what the experimenter was studying. Researchers need to obtain informed consent trom participants betore conducting a study. Obtaining informed consent involves explaining the general purpose of the study and each participant’s rights as a subject, including the voluntary nature of participation and the potential costs and benefits of participation. Researchers must also respect a participant’s right to refuse to participate at any time during the course of a study. In addition, special steps must be taken to protect the confidentiality of the data and to maintain participants anonymity unless they agree to be identified.
Deception in research remains a controversial issue. Some studies would lose their effectiveness if participants knew in advance exactly what the experimenter was studying.
The ethical guideline generally applied to this issue is that if deception must be used, a postexperiment debriefing must thoroughly explain to participants why the deception was necessary. At that time, participants must be allowed to request that their data be removed from the study and destroved.
Two extreme examples of violating ethical guidelines occurred in the 1930s and 1940s. One study that began in the 1930s–the”Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male”- included a group of 399 Black men with syphilis. These men were given periodic medical exams and told they were being treated for syphilis, when in fact they were receiving no treatment (Centers for Disease Control, 2017). The researchers wanted to understand the consequences of leaving the disease untreated, which they learned was death. Unbelievably, the study was continued from 1932 to 1972, even as many of the participants suffered and died. In the mid-1970s congress held hearings about the study and a class-action lawsuit was settled to compensate the surviving participants and their families. Another egregious example of ethical violation in sex research took place in the 1940s when U.S. researchers deliberately injected thousands of Guatemalans with sexually transmitted infections (STIs) such as gonorrhea and syphilis (Walter, 2012). Between 1946 and 1948, U.S. government researchers experimented without consent on more than 5,000 Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, prostitutes, orphans, and people with psychiatric disorders. Many of these involuntary participants suffered from severe symptoms of ST Is, some for a lifetime. These experiments, ethically