Using data derived from interviews conducted in 1969 and 1970 with subjects in the San Francisco Bay Area, Bell et al. attempted to test explanations of sexual orientation put forward by psychoanalysts and social scientists.

In their view, theories about the origins of sexual orientation had usually not been rigorously tested prior to their study, partly because some of them, including those advanced by psychoanalysts, use concepts which are hard to "pin down and operationalize.

"[1] They anticipated that psychologists and psychoanalysts would object to their work on methodological grounds, such as that no attempt was made to access unconscious material, or that the interviews, which lasted only a few hours, could never reveal what truly occurred in someone's childhood.

Phenomena associated with physical maturation, such as the age at which menstruation began, did not appear to play a significant role in the development of sexual preference, while parental attitudes toward sex and failure to enjoy early heterosexual activity also seemed unimportant.

They concluded that psychodynamic theories exaggerate the role of parents in the development of their sons' sexual orientation, and that the psychoanalytic model that attributes male homosexuality to dominant mothers and weak fathers is inadequate.

They found the idea that "cold, detached" fathers and poor father-son relationships predispose boys toward homosexuality more plausible, but emphasized that these factors have only an indirect connection to sexual preference.

Although stressing that their model "applies only to extant theories and does not create new ones", they wrote that they had identified "a pattern of feelings and reactions within the child that cannot be traced back to a single social or psychological root".

Persons assisting the study included the gay rights activists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, the sociologists John Gagnon and William Simon, and the anthropologist Paul Gebhard.

[40] Prior to its publication, Jane E. Brody wrote in The New York Times that Sexual Preference was likely to cause controversy because of its findings and its reliance on path analysis and its subjects' memories.

He noted that its authors' conclusion that the lack of correlation between sexual orientation and early family experience means that the development of heterosexuality and homosexuality must be based on a biological predisposition was controversial.

[58][59] Criticisms made of the work included that its authors' conclusions were based on an unrepresentative or dubiously representative sample of homosexuals, and that their reliance on path analysis and adult recall of early childhood feeling was problematic.

Although he considered it regrettable that it took them more than a decade to publish their analysis of their study's data, and believed it was "directed more toward the lay reader than to the professional community", he found their work valuable for its exploration of the possible biological basis of homosexuality.

He wrote that the study employed questions that were "vague" and "open-ended", and that its authors had an "arbitrary and rigid conception" of what could be done with their data, lacked "theoretical development" in its handling, and deliberately minimized the importance of the predictor variables they used to test psychoanalytic and other theories.

He contrasted Bell and Weinberg's work unfavorably with that of European thinkers whom he credited with "provocative theoretical speculations": the philosophers Michel Foucault and Guy Hocquenghem, the gay rights activist Mario Mieli, the sexologist Martin Dannecker, and the sociologist Jeffrey Weeks.

Nevertheless, she found their methodology and interpretation of data open to question, writing that although their San Francisco Bay Area sample was arguably non-representative, they wrote as though the study was representative of the larger population, that they did not sufficiently explore the issue of bias in their subjects' self-reports, which might have been motivated by the subjects' ideology or desire to please the researchers by telling them what they thought they wanted to hear, and that they relegated the fact that respondents who had been exposed to scientific information regarding homosexuality were more likely to characterize their parents in accord with psychoanalytic models of emotionally absent fathers and domineering mothers to a footnote.

He argued that the only plausible basis for disputing that the study definitively refutes "social learning theories of homosexual etiology" is to challenge the adequacy of its authors' models and the questions they employed.

"[69] The social psychologist Daryl Bem credited Bell et al. with providing the most important data concerning "experience-based theories" of the development of sexual orientation in Psychological Review.

He referred to Bell et al.′s finding that gay men and lesbians were significantly more likely to recall having felt different from same-sex children during the grade-school years, and to other studies that drew similar conclusions.

[71] Bem, in a defense of his hypothesis published in the same issue of Psychological Review, wrote that in their path analysis Bell et al. engaged in "an unfortunate dichotomization of the dependent variable, sexual orientation ... grouping the bisexual and homosexual respondents into the same category."

"[72] Peplau et al. wrote in the Annual Review of Sex Research that while Bell et al.′s suggestion that biological factors have a stronger influence on exclusive homosexuality than they have on bisexuality may seem plausible, it has not been directly tested and appears to conflict with available evidence, such as that concerning prenatal hormone exposure.

[75] The psychologist J. Michael Bailey and his co-authors described Sexual Preference as a "landmark study" that "seemingly disposed of the idea that homosexuality resulted from the quality of parent-child relationships" in Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

[77] The psychologist William Paul and the sex researcher Weinrich maintained that Sexual Preference documented social diversity well and was the largest study conducted specifically on homosexuality, but that it was limited by the problems Bell et al. encountered in trying to obtain a representative sample.

He suggested that like sociobiologists and others who have attempted to find a biological explanation for social behavior Bell et al. had an "urge to fill a conceptual gap" stronger than their "adherence to theoretical consistency and political judgment".

Johnson concluded, however, that the study's credibility was enhanced by the fact that Bell et al. took into account whether their respondents had been exposed to books or articles about the etiology of homosexuality, and disregarded results when they could be explained by such exposure.

Johnson credited Bell et al. with showing that "almost all the alleged causes of adult sexual orientation are either nonexistent or highly exaggerated", but considered their claim that they had refuted psychoanalytic theories that attribute homosexuality to an unresolved Oedipus complex only "half true", given the father findings.

Ruse argued that there is much to support Bell et al.′s conclusion that Freudian explanations of homosexuality confuse the direction of cause and effect and that the cold and distant relationships gay men report having with their fathers are a result of parental reactions to effeminate or sensitive sons.

However, he noted that the accuracy of Bell et al.′s findings is open to doubt for many reasons: their subjects could have been unwittingly giving them the answers they wanted to hear, failed to remember accurately, or suppressed painful childhood memories.

They described Bell et al. as "essentialists", who, unlike supporters of social constructionism, maintain that "homosexual desire, identity, and persons exist as real in some form, in different cultures and historical eras".

He credited them with avoiding the biases of many previous studies, which had drawn their samples from unrepresentative sources such as psychotherapy patients or prison populations, but noted that they failed to identify the cause of homosexuality.

He observed that their suggestion that homosexuality may have a biological basis placed them in opposition to Kinsey's views, and that they ignored research that correlated the origins of same-sex preference with factors such as time of puberty, the amount of early sex, and masturbatory patterns.