Starting in the 2022-2023 academic year, Jamie Budnick will be appointed as Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. Budnick earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan in 2020. She is currently a NICHD Postdoctoral Fellow in the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Dr. Budnick’s research focuses on the sexuality knowledge produced through demography and population measurement. She also conducts research focusing on reproductive health, intimate partner violence, social survey measures, and sexual identity. This peer-reviewed research has been published in the American Sociological Review, Contexts, Demography, Gender & Society, and Sexualities.
Benjamin Cornwell, Chair of the Department, highlighted that “Dr. Budnick’s research is fascinating for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it challenges the received view of what sexuality actually is, as suggested by the very questions that survey researchers use to study it. This perspective is poised to challenge findings and assumptions that emerge from decades of highly funded survey data.” This is illustrated in her recent co-authored paper, “Dangerous Data: Seeing Social Surveys through the Sexuality Prism,” published in Sexualities. This article analyses the prevalence of the widespread assumption of, or negative undertones to, non-normative sexual behaviors in major national surveys. For example, non-normative sexual behaviors are often framed as inherently risky. (See the abstract of this article below, for further reference.)
Dr. Budnick is currently working on a book that outlines the role social science plays in shaping our understanding of sex and sexuality. The book is tentatively titled: The New Gay Science: How Demography Shaped Sexuality Knowledge and LGBTQ Politics.
Abstract
Social surveys both reflect and shape beliefs about sexuality. Social norms construct the “authorized vocabulary” of surveys and the resulting data influence the research questions that can be answered and the policies likely to be inspired by study findings. Scholars have called for balancing attention to pleasure vs. danger and normative vs. non-normative practices in studies of sexuality as well as for collection of data on sexual desires, behaviors, and identities. We combine these calls into what we term the sexuality prism. To better understand how data about sexuality are typically collected and what research they facilitate or constrain, we analyze six decades of materials from four of the largest social surveys in the United States and five national surveys focused on sexuality, health, and family formation. We find that these surveys do not allow for investigations of the full sexuality prism. Instead, they tend to assume and narrowly investigate the “charmed circle” of sexuality: heterosexual, married, monogamous, and potentially procreative couplings. When surveys ask about non-normative practices, they do so primarily in the context of risk (e.g. sexually transmitted diseases) and ignore non-normative practices that are not deemed “risky.” The focus on risk likely explains the greater attention to sexual behaviors and the shortage of questions about sexual desires and identities. Moreover, most questions about sexual practices highlight the dangers of sex, rather than the pleasures. Not only does this severely limit the scope of U.S. sexuality research, it also means that, individually and collectively, these surveys reify “sex negativity.”
