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. 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. In 1971 he published his textbook on the family and it became one of the best selling texts in the country and went into four editions. His textbook brought in premarital, marital and extramarital sexuality and homosexual and heterosexual aspects as well as love and gender factors, much more than any of the other textbooks in the family field had done. His definitions of family and marriage stressed the essential elements of these institutions and contained a wide variety of types of family and marital systems. The text had a cross cultural and historical emphasis and a research and theory base for the explanatory concepts that were developed. In 1980 Reiss and two of his colleagues published a research and theory paper on factors that predicted a person's attitudes towards extramarital sexuality. The article won the 1980 Reuben Hill award as the best publication on theory and methods in the family area.