The was combined with limitations on what data could be analysed. The shortest time it took to punch a history card was eighty minutes, reached in 1942, this meant that 18,000 histories took 24,000 hours to complete. This new equipment is a godsend to our particular problem.” Despite this, it remained limited. The machine will do it at the rate of 400 cards per minute. Kinsey stated “I had despaired of ever analysing these formulae by hand techniques. It was easy for Kinsey to collate and compare data. Drucker argues that the punch card system could be used effectively for “two or three element analysis”. A normal interview took between 90 minutes and 2 hours for Kinsey or a trained interviewer and typically around 300 questions were asked. Machine technology was also advanced for the time the punch card system, is seen as an early computer.
Despite criticisms of his interview methods and his attempts to standardise sexuality, Machine technology, in this instance, is effective because it allowed Kinsey to analyse lots of data and justify his conclusions as a result of quantitative research.
Kinsey’s work was able to find conclusions that went against social norms and to be justified as the punch card system allowed Kinsey to draw conclusions from mass amounts of data. Kinsey’s findings would have been harder to defend if it weren’t for the large sample sizes that claimed to speak for “average” America. For example, showing how widespread homosexuality and pre-marital affairs for women were. Winkler argues that through quantitative research, Kinsey’s findings were more justified. Hamilton, but Kinsey’s studies are considered the most extensive and public. Other quantitative sex studies were conducted before and during the time of Kinsey’s work, such as the work done by Gilbert V. This created specific and often extreme examples that were not thought to represent the norm. This was conducted by physicians or psychiatrists on their patients, or small-scale research into marginal groups, such as prison populations. Kinsey fits into the shift amongst researchers towards quantitative analysis to support qualitative evidence in the US, away from the previous case study format. Overall, in reference to Kinsey’s research, machine technology was a force for good, but always had its own technological capacity and the prejudices of the researchers built into it. Masters and Johnson’s 1966 report Human Sexual Response painstakingly details the human physiological sexual response as a result of a number of “experiments” and a wide use of technology. There are benefits and limitations of using machine technology to understand the physiology and psychology of human sexuality. For example, the use of the penile strain gauge and vaginal photoplethysmograph, and the work of researchers such as Masters, Johnson and Bancroft.
Other researchers used machine technology to understand human sexuality in different ways. While Kinsey’s two major volumes Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) were based on data from punch card technology, Donna Drucker argues this is largely ignored in historiography. Moreover, the interviews Kinsey had to take for the punch cards tried to standardise sexuality, a wholly personal and varied topic. In hindsight, his utilisiation of technology is flawed, as while punch cards were a leading technology at the time, the system took a number of days to generate results. Through his 18,000 interviews he is seen to have led the way in sex research, using advanced technology and a relatively open mindset. Alfred Kinsey used punch cards to process large amounts of data, in a move from qualitative to quantitative scientific research. This was accompanied by the use of machine technology in this research. In post war America there was an increase in researching human sexuality, especially from different perspectives, such as public health and psychiatry. By Natasha Brake, Third Year History Student
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