In determining what percentage of the population was homosexual and what percentage was heterosexual, why would Alfred Kinsey have avoided asking the question, "Do you identify as gay or straight?"
A) He needed to justify his research by having lots of questions.
B) He believed that sexuality is a continuum and wanted to classify people more precisely.
C) He believed that people would lie to him and needed to be tricked into revealing that they were gay.
D) He didn't really believe in sexual orientation, but saw "homosexual" and "heterosexual" as socially constructed and constantly changing.
E) He thought that there would be a large number of transgendered people in his sample.

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

Kinsey believed that sexuality was not an either/or dichotomy and that people fell on a spectrum of sexual attraction and behavior. Therefore, he avoided the terms "gay" and "straight" in order to categorize people more precisely. He instead asked about sexual behavior and attraction in a detailed way, leading to his famous Kinsey Scale.

In Determining What Percentage of the Population Was Homosexual and What