SAMPLE DESCRIPTION: SAMPLE SOURCES
The great majority of the sex offenders and virtually all the prison group were interviewed while they were in an institution. We drew almost wholly from three major sources:
1. Indiana State Farm, a state jail principally for misdemeanants with sentences ranging from 30 days to one year. The inmates were chiefly from the Midwest, including Kentucky and Tennessee, and strongly rural.
California prisons. These were the California State Prison, San Quentin; California State Prison at Folsom; California State Prison at Soledad; California Institution for Men, Chino; and the California Medical Facility, which at the time of our interviewing was at Terminal Island, but now is at Vacaville. With a few exceptions, all the inmates in these institutions were serving sentences for felonies; misdemeanants were excluded. Nearly two fifths of the prison group and almost one third of the sex offenders were in one or another of the California prisons. Since our society is highly mobile and since California has received an influx of persons from other regions, the inmates had been born and reared in many different states. In brief, the sample does not contain an undue number of California natives. In any case our studies have led us to believe that geographic location has relatively little to do with sexual attitudes and behavior; more important are considerations such as socioeconomic level and religious devout-ness. Consequently, we feel that our sample derived from California institutions would not prove markedly different from a sample drawn from institutions randomly selected. Indeed, many of the California inmates had served sentences in other states.
California Department of Mental Hygiene institutions. Sex offenders who have been adjudged sexual psychopaths, or who are under observation for judgment, are ordinarily confined not in prisons but in special institutions under the Department of Mental Hygiene. We interviewed men in the Metropolitan State Hospital, Norwalk (which no longer houses sexual psychopaths), and Atascadero State Hospital. Like the California prison inmates, many of these men were born and reared in states other than California.
Describing the sources from which the members of the control group were drawn is a difficult task, for in large part they are the result of ex post facto selection rather than of expeditions aimed at obtaining control-group case histories. For expository purposes one can consider them as coming from three types of sources:
1. The first was comprised of groups, organizations, and definable aggregates of persons—for example, church members, unions, parents and teachers associated with a nursery school, students of a particular high school, Salvation Army members and beneficiaries, etc. In some of the organizations a large number of the members had the requisites for inclusion in the control group; in others merely a few were eligible. All in all, 250 of the control-group males came from these sources. The number is smaller than one might have anticipated, since we excluded all individuals who came from sources known to be biased in favor of some particular sexual behavior. Thus, for instance, since we know that the incidence of homosexuality is unusually high in the world of the arts, we ruled out of our sample whole casts of plays and members of other organized art groups. This selectivity, it should be noted, is aimed at sources of histories, not at professions or individuals; an actor or painter who came to us as a member of a church or PTA would be incorporated in our control group. Similarly, we excluded what one might call “therapy groups”—persons with psychological problems which led them to clinics, psychiatrists, psychologists, and sometimes to us. Lastly, we excluded unusual groups, groups which we had sampled because of their atypical sexual traits; an example would be a group of transvestites.
2. The next type of source might be termed our “hospital sample,” and it was gathered expressly to enlarge and improve the control group. For this purpose we needed people with less than college education, preferably with less than tenth-grade education, many of whom should be unskilled or semiskilled workers. Such persons are the most difficult to obtain. Our usual mode of operation, addressing the assembled members of some group and then asking them for cooperation, was impractical here since the majority belonged to no organized groups, except for unions and churches whose meetings they did not necessarily attend with any regularity. Moreover, it is not easy to make use of either churches or unions—the very fact that we are allowed time at a scheduled meeting is in the eyes of many tantamount to official sponsorship of our efforts. This engenders various objections and resentments among some of the members who feel that they are being placed under unfair compulsion or at least being subjected to unwanted solicitation. Similar objections arise if one attempts to sample a factory or store via the employer, but tin’s difficulty is rarely encountered since few employers can afford to let us intrude “on company time.” On the other hand, to seek out individually the persons we wanted, explain our research to each, and gain their cooperation, is prohibitively costly in terms of money and time. To solve the problem, at least partially, we devised our “hospital sample.” With the cooperation of a number of hospitals in Baltimore, New York, and Buffalo, we examined the records of male patients in public hospitals and were able to sort out those whose education and occupations made them eligible for our control group. We then examined their medical histories and ruled out any chronic invalids or anyone whose physical condition could have had a long-term adverse influence on his sexual behavior. In brief, what we wanted was the man who had had reasonable health until the last year or two (which we would omit in our calculations), or, better yet, healthy men who entered the hospital because of some industrial or traffic accident. In all, we obtained 120 men from these hospitals. We found that such hospital sampling is unfortunately no final answer to our problem of obtaining case histories from the unskilled and semiskilled workers. The wide availability of medical insurance and various company and union insurance plans has resulted in the great majority of hospital patients having private physicians whose consent must be obtained before the patient can be solicited. Tracking down these busy doctors and trying to explain our research and its needs over the telephone has proven not feasible, nor is lying in wait to seize the doctor when he visits his patient or patients at the hospital. Consequently, we had available only those patients who had no private physicians and who were wholly under the jurisdiction of the hospital. These men are relatively few nowadays and tend to be both aged and indigent. There are, however, some specialized hospitals where the staff has essentially complete authority regarding treatment regardless of whether the patient entered via a physician or not. Such hospitals can be of great value to us, and through the cooperation of one we obtained 78 of our total of 120 hospital-derived cases.
3. The last type of source must be labeled simply as stray individuals whose histories were obtained fortuitously. Some of them came to us as by-products of our group sampling—for instance, a relative of a person whom we had interviewed as a group member. Others came in contact with us in a variety of ways: a visitor to the Institute, a janitor in a building where we were temporarily stationed, a hitchhiker, a seat mate on a train or airplane, a friend of a friend, etc. The case histories of these people were also carefully examined for selective bias, and a considerable number were rejected. For example, anyone who came to us avowedly or covertly because of some sexual problem or unusual behavior was not included in the control group. There are 107 stray individuals who passed this screening in our control group.
These three sorts of sources were compared on a number of items of demography and sexual behavior. Since the “hospital sample” was designed to obtain certain varieties of individuals whom we did not have in sufficient numbers in the pre-existing control group, it is obvious that the comparison showed some anticipated differences: the men in the “hospital sample” were much older, fewer had never married, and their occupational status was lower. In terms of sexual behavior there proved to be only one important difference: the “hospital sample” had a markedly lower incidence of homosexual activity than can be accounted for by differences in age or marital status. The discrepancy is especially noticeable in youth, but at present we cannot explain it.
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Tags: Erectile Dysfunction, Men’s Health