Ira Leonard Reiss (born 1925) is a sociologist with primary interests in studying the way society impacts sexual attitudes and behaviors and how people respond to those pressures. He also has interests in the study of gender and family, particularly as they relate to sexuality. He attended Syracuse University for his B.S. degree and the Pennsylvania State University for his M. A. and Ph. D. degrees. His major area in graduate school was sociology and his minor areas were cultural anthropology and philosophy. His doctoral course work in sociology and philosophy was done at Columbia University and his French and German language study was taken at Yale University.
Overview
Reiss taught at Bowdoin College (1953–55), College of William and Mary (1955–59), Bard College (1959–61), the University of Iowa (1961–69) and the University of Minnesota (1969–96). He retired as Professor Emeritus in June 1996 but his professional work has continued right up to the present time. He has won a number of awards for his research and theory efforts. He was elected President of the International Academy of Sex Research, The Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, The National Council on Family Relations and the Midwest Sociological Society. His teaching was ranked in the top segment of the sociology department at both the University of Iowa and the University of Minnesota and he was nominated for the University wide distinguished teacher awards at both those Universities. He has received an award for mentoring from both the undergraduate students and the graduate students at the University of Minnesota. He has written 14 books, four monographs and over 150 professional papers.
Professional interests
Reiss's major goal has been to promulgate a broad view of science and to shape the study of sexuality to fit that pluralistic perspective of scientific work. He stresses the importance of building theoretical explanations because he feels that theory opens pathways that enable us to understand and to contain our many sexual problem areas. Reiss supports both a sociological and a multidisciplinary approach to sexual phenomena. His major theoretical work is discussed in the parts that follow and involve explanations of premarital sexuality, extramarital sexuality, cross cultural sexuality, and pluralistic sexual values that allow people to promote more rational input into our sexual attitudes and behavior.
He strongly supports the development of a multidisciplinary sexual science field with its own Ph.D. program at one of our major universities. He sees the Ph.D. degree as affording legitimacy to the field of sexual science and enhancing our ability to move the study of sexuality from the role of an orphan in other fields to that of a discipline with its own home and core agenda.
In 2005 Ira and Harriet Reiss founded the Reiss Theory Award for the best social science theory article, chapter or book of the year. The award is jointly sponsored by the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (FSSS) and the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS) and is given each year at the annual meeting of SSSS.
Professional work
The Autonomy Theory
Reiss established his reputation as a major figure in the social science study of human sexuality in his writings on premarital sexuality. He felt that Alfred Kinsey had focused on the area of behavior and neglected the importance of sexual attitudes and standards. Starting in the late 1950s he developed a scale that measured a person's degree of premarital sexual permissiveness. The scale became one of the most popular scales in the country used in premarital sexual research. The revised short form of the vaginal intercourse scale is still in use. He predicted the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and described how it would change our premarital sexual customs. Reiss early on sought to discover what socio/cultural factors altered people's level of premarital sexual permissiveness. He received three National Institute of Mental Health research grants (1960–1964) to carry out his studies. To test his scales and his explanations he used a nationally representative sample of the U.S. and also representative samples from two high schools and four colleges. His explanation of sexual permissiveness in America stressed the importance of the autonomy of women and of children as a major factor in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. His predictions based on this theory regarding changes in women's sexuality and other changes have largely been supported.