David Gale writes: << . . . The objective of the survey is to get information on public health concerns, fertility, sexually transmitted disease, etc. However I bring it up here because it contains the most glaring examples I have yet seen of published inconsistency. It's the well worn story that males have many more "sexual partners" than females. Interested people should look at the report. For example, Tables 10 and 11 of the survey show that the median number of partners "in lifetime" for males over forty is 8 while that for females is 3.8. To immediately recognize the inconsistency imagine the same survey with but with the words sexual partners replaced by spouses. For more of the same look at Figure 6 on page 6. More inconsistency: when men and women are asked for the number of partners over the past 12 months, Tables 1 and 2, the numbers come out the same, within epsilon. . . .

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I'm not entirely sure what the researchers were supposed to do -- they are merely reporting the results of their survey and attempting to interpret the inconsistencies, which to their credit they acknowledge. It is a well-known fact that people's unverifiable self-descriptions are biased toward making themselves look good (or at least better than reality), and so are prone to inconsistency. Many simple explanations are possible. One is the truism that it is often considered an indication of virility for men to have had numerous sexual partners (up to a point), whereas for women this is often frowned upon. Hence, men would have an incentive to report higher, and women lower, numbers, than actual fact. (But when only the past year is considered, the numbers are relatively small, so there may be less incentive to mis-report -- and also a clearer memory of what actually happened.) I don't get why replacing "sexual partners" with "spouses" makes any inconsistency clearer. It seems easy to believe that unmarried sexual behavior tends to be different from married. --Dan