Content area
Full Text
Abstract
Laud Humphreys' Tea Room Trade has been a regular topic in discussions of social research ethics for thirty years. This article reviews some of the past criticisms and offers a current assessment of Humphreys' research ethics.
When I wrote Survey Research Methods in 1971-73, the manuscript reviewers were very positive, except for two things. First, they were a little uptight, I thought, about my only calculating three statistics in the manuscript-and getting two of them wrong. Secondly, they were not pleased to find an appendix on research ethics. While they did not object to ethical research, they saw no place for that discussion in a methodology textbook. Beside my section on "Rights of Subjects," for example, one reviewer angrily wrote, "What about the rights of science?" In the three decades since that comment, social researchers have gotten ever more conscious of the ethical dimension in research design and execution, methods textbooks won't be taken seriously without a substantial discussion of research ethics, and the federal goveminent has gotten into the act as well.
Tearoom Trade was published a couple of years before I was cautioned to pay more attention to the "rights of science" and less to the rights of subjects. Some might find it ironic, then, that Tearoom Trade and other reports on Laud Humphrey's research prompted heated debates over research ethics at a time when ethics was a rather low priority for many social scientists. I would like to suggest two illegitimate bases for the flack Humphreys received and then consider a more serious issues of ethics.
The Subject Matter
I will not be the first to suggest that some of the outrage over Tearoom Trade was a homophobic response to the subject matter. Nor was Laud Humphreys the first sex researcher to be accused of ethical breaches. Henry Havelock Ellis's work was censored, his publisher prosecuted, and Ellis earned an FBI dossier. Kinsey's work on human sexuality produced howls of outrage and threats against Indiana University. Masters and Johnson were accused on voyeurism.
Laud Humphreys did not just study S-E-X but observed and discussed homosexuality. And it was not even the caring-and-- committed-relationships-between-two-people-who-just-happen-to-be -of-the-same-sex homosexuality but tawdry encounters between strangers in public toilets. Only adding the sacrifice of Christian...