A review essay on Lisa Wade's American Hookup and Mark Regenerus' Cheap Sex: Is Recreational Sex a Social Problem? Or what’s wrong with kid’s today?

Abstract

word count 4197Decades have passed since we have liberated normative sex from the confines of heterosexual marriage. But the divorce of sexual activity from romantic relationships among young people is still the topic of much debate. Both books address what's happening with sex and relationships today, and although they identify similar trends, their analyses could not be more different. Wade's book is a must read for anyone interested in today's young adults or residential college campus culture. The Regenerus book is not worth your time unless you are teaching a methodology course and looking for obvious examples of logical fallacies, misrepresentation of correlation as causation, and ideology barely masked as social science. I begin by identifying the commonalities that do exist in both books and then briefly summarize the findings, and evaluate the strength and weakness of each book separately. To conclude I address the elephant in the review, the role of values in this research, and in social science more generally.Both these monographs are "crossover" books, written to add to the research literature and also for a popular audience. So what criterion should I use for a review for an academic audience? In a research monograph, we expect attention paid to methodology, recruitment of subjects, analytic strategy, theoretically guided hypotheses. A book for a popular audience needs to cover such technical topics very lightly and with no jargon. Both Wade and Regenerus walk this tightrope presenting new research findings while writing catchy public sociology. Regenerus fails, Wade succeeds. But to be fair, it is far easier to explain her primarily qualitative data gathering techniques, and the typology she develops from them then it is for Regenerus who has nearly as many interviews and also quantitative analyses from survey data. Both the quantitative analyses and the interview data in the Cheap Sex were sadly lacking even basic methodological details, either in text or in the Appendix. For example, in a 262 page book based on 100 interviews and a quantitative dataset gathered for the project, Regenerus only provides four tables. But worse than that, we find significance levels of .10 with no explanation, one table with a sample of those under 35 and another including respondents up to 60 years of age. The faith needed to accept quantitative findings without the analyses themselves would be easier if this wasn't an author who was previously involved in a highly criticized scheme to publish what has been called "junk" social science (https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2012/08/15/regnerus-studycontroversy-guide/) apparently designed to help defeat the legalization of same-sex marriage. It is even less reassuring that another reviewer has been denied access to these data to replicate the analysis (Cohen, 2017). Still, to review the book, I must take the findings at face value. No such problem with The American Hook Up. Wade explains the sources of her primarily qualitative data, from student diaries, interviews...