Very low response rates make popular sex surveys misleading

Evidence

But as David Myers (1992, p. 12) has pointed out, these polls are often poorly done and almost certainly give a distorted account of what is really going on. Shere Hite’s (1989) popular Women and Love was based on responses from 4,500 women, which impresses one initially. But the sample was drawn exclusively from members of women’s organizations, and less than 5% of the surveys mailed out were completed and returned. So Hite’s report that 70% of the respondents who had been married at least five years were having affairs does not necessarily apply to your Aunt Bertha and Uncle Harry. Ask them, if you do not believe me. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 2203 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The small size of the sample, 171 subjects, meant that the percentage figures given in the tables sometimes concealed absurdly small real numbers. But when quantitative data were being presented it was impossible to avoid giving the impression that they were representative, and in the spring of 1959 Friedeburg therefore undertook a supplementary study. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 581 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Small student samples made percentage figures misleadingly representative — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2351; Highly publicized sex surveys suffer severe self-selection and response bias — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 2203; Men report far fewer acts of intercourse than sexually active women — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 4232 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Highly publicized sex surveys suffer severe self-selection and response bias #corroborates (1.00) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 2203
• Presenting percentages from tiny samples falsely implies representativeness. #complicates (0.72) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 581