"Everybody's doing it"

Live Science has an article on the pattern of sexual activity in a midwestern high school.

The work was based on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a 1995 survey of students at an unidentified Midwestern high school. The students were mostly white, in the only public school in a mid-sized city more than an hour away from a metropolis. Of about 1,000 students at the school, 832 were interviewed and asked to identify their sexual and romantic partners over the previous 18 months. Just more than half reported having sexual intercourse, a rate comparable to the national average, the researchers say.

In other words, as close to a middle-class, mid-sized "white bread" school as they could get.

The accompanying illustration is interesting. In addition to showing various patterns of sexual relationships, I notice one feature is extremely rare.

Do you see it?

I'll wait.

First of all, I'll remark on how easily this study has lumped together sexual relationships and "romantic relationships". Are those that close to being one-and-the-same these days?

Secondly, I count 466 students in the diagram. I didn't count pairings, but I did look for specific types of pairing. I found six students who engaged in same-sex pairings (four male, two female) and only one male student had paired only with a student of the same sex. That student's partner had paired with one other student (a female), and the other two males had each paired with three other females. Of the two female students, one had paired with three other students, the other with two.

Based on this sample, it's hard to justify the claim that 10% of the population is homosexual, or that even as many as 1% are.

Of course, the usual questions about the accuracy of this sort of survey abound.