Vital Statistics: For a Sex Survey, Privacy Goes a Long Way

It is not easy to ask people about their sex lives, and getting honest answers may be even harder. But there are ways to do it. One good method is to have a computer ask the questions, while the interviewee listens through earphones and enters the answers on the screen — without the intervention, or even the presence, of another human.

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Last month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report on sexual behavior that used this technique with laptops to gather data on Americans’ sexual behavior, attraction and identity by age, marital status, education and race. Anjani Chandra, the lead author, said the process was developed to assure total anonymity for the respondents.

Dr. Chandra, a demographer with the agency, explained: “The computer tells the interviewees what key to press to lock away the responses. When they return the laptop to the interviewers, they can’t get in. It’s transmitted to a central place where the data processing happens without names or addresses. We get a file that can’t be linked back to the person.”

The researchers got a 75 percent response rate, very high for a household survey, when they interviewed more than 13,000 people ages 15 to 44 from 2006 to 2008.

They found a large reduction in sexual activity among young adults ages 15 to 24. According to the survey, about 29 percent of women and 27 percent of men had not had sexual contact with the opposite sex. This was a sharp increase from 2002, when about 23 percent of young adults had never had sex.

Among men and women older than 25, about 99 percent had had vaginal intercourse. About 90 percent of men and 89 percent of women had had heterosexual oral sex, and 44 percent of men and 36 percent of women had had anal sex with an opposite-sex partner.

Forty-year-old virgins were rare: In the 40-to-44 age group, only 1 percent of men and even fewer women had never had relations with the opposite sex. But in the 15-to-19-year-old group, 43 percent of males and 48 percent of females reported never having an opposite-sex partner.

Over all, about 13 percent of women and 5 percent of men reported same-sex sexual behavior. ??NICHOLAS BAKALAR