A2 Synoptic Link: Methods and Deviance

"At shortly after five o'clock on a weekday evening, four men enter a public toilet in the city park..."

The above statement hardly sounds like the beginning of one of the most controversial pieces of sociological reseach ever done, but Laud Humphrey's research has divided researcher for the best part of forty years. During the A2 Sociology course students are asked to make the link between the methods of collecting data and why these particular methods are suitible for the study of crime and deviance. During the course you will hear names such as William Whyte and Eileen Barker, but the case which grabs the attention of the modern sociology student is that of Laud Humphreys. For Humphrey's choice of PhD topic he decided to study the "Tearoom" trade, which was the male-male sexual encounters in public toilets, a term known in US slang as "Tea Rooming", Humphrey's basic hypothesis was that men participating in this activity in such activity came from diverse social backgrounds, they also had a variety of reasons for seeking homosexual contact in such venues.

Humphrey's first method was to observe these men by acting as a "watch queen" at the venues which was to prevent individuals interupting the activity or raising the alarm if the police were present. In the 1960s this activity was illegal. He gathered information from approx. 100 men and then obtained personal information on the individuals, by copying down their license plate. He then interviewed these men under the disguise as someone conducting a "health" survey.

What Humphreys found was that there was very little was different between the men engaging in these activities from typical adult males (Reynolds, 1982). What the Sociology student must address is the ethical issues involved in this research. Did Humphrey's have any right to conduct the research in this manner? Humphrey's defence was that there was no alternative on offer to study this "deviant" group (or criminal). A questionnaire or an interview with the respondents would have revealed no valid information, as subjects would not have admitted their behaviour, especially to a researcher noting down the results! There was a heated debate which followed this research and for many years researchers within Washington University argued that the PhD should not be awarded.