Statistiken der Liebe oder: Dr. Kinsey fragt die Frauen.: Umfrageforschung und ihre mediale Vermarktung in transnationaler Perspektive

Abstract

Statistics of love, or: Dr. Kinsey asks the women. Surveys and media marketing in transnational perspective With a view to British and West German sex surveys in the tradition of Alfred C. Kinsey’s survey-based reports, the article explores how surveys were produced and how survey data was communicated in the popular press in the late 1940s and 1950s. It analyses the transnational career of representative surveys à la Kinsey as a knowledge transfer that complied with the rules of media society, being not so much driven by academic concerns, but by the print media and their interest in communicable and marketable knowledge. Following up the extensive media coverage of Kinsey’s work, popular newspapers in Britain as well as in West Germany commissioned the first nation-wide sex surveys and published their outcomes. Striving to attract the attention of their readers, they employed the surveys as marketing devises, thereby emphasising both the originality and scientific objectivity of their own reporting.