now this begins to be a useful approximation of orientation

[jinian]

from http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journals/details/issue/sample/a010339.pdf

Own sexual identity was assessed with a modified form of the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid (KSOG; Klein, 1985). Participants were asked to rate four dimensions: their physical and sexual attractions/fantasies; their sexual behavior; their emotional connection; and their self-identification during the past four years along a Kinsey-type, seven-point scale, in order to examine what the meaning of sexual orientation was to each person. These four entries were summed to create a single value for the variable of sexual orientation, with higher scores indicating greater degrees of identification as a lesbian.

Comments

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've seen the Klein grid before, and it is a big improvement in terms of descriptive accuracy.

That said, I wonder why the authors of this paper took all those Klein scores (attraction, behavior, emotions, identity) and lumped them all together again into a single summed score. It would seem to me that the whole point of using the Klein grid is to be able to separate those things out and examine them separately.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

That part didn't make a lot of sense to me either. Maybe they were trying to get past some kind of resistance to identifying precisely, but it seems like they'd have to be sneakier than that to get anything the respondents didn't want to tell them.

[kiya]

Hrm. I suspect I'm going to continue to feel grumpy about orientation models in general as long as they're stuck on the idea that sex/gender is necessarily the primary (and often, the only) trait to consider.

Which reminds me I need to go give oneironaut a shove. . . .

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Interesting article. The Klein Grid is a definite improvement over the Kinsey scale, but still suffers from the problem that when you get into the morass of gender identity and what people are primarily attracted to (which may or may not involve the the sex or gender of the object of attraction) no model that I've ever seen does justice to the realities of the situation.

One division I've seen in the bi community is between people who have one (often fairly androgynous) "type" that they look for in lovers and people who have significantly different expectations about their male and female partners (the most common being that such people wish to have traditionally masculine male lovers and traditionally feminine female lovers).

I believe that the members of these two subsets of bi people have fundamentally different sexual preferences and yet I've never seen a scale that acknowledges this difference.

Btw, I also wanted to say hi. I did a search for folk with similar interests and we seem to have many, it's always cool to find another P.C. Hodgell fan.

Blessings and Joy-

-Heron

[jinian.livejournal.com]

That's a very interesting point about bi people. I definitely have several types of people I'm attracted to, as well as the piles of off-type folks. I'm not sure I'd say that my orientation was part of either subset you're describing. Do you suppose the people who like manly men and womanly women are a simplified case of my liking short blond girls and tall geeky boys with long hair and glasses and and and? :)

My Hodgell fandom is a strange thing. Intellectually, I don't think they are the best books ever, but I am compelled to reread them a lot and infect others.

Nice to meet you!