Dr Catherine Mercer
speaker
43 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2012
last heard May 2012
Dr Catherine Mercer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The bottom line is that women are less likely to report that they cheat on their partners than men.
But as it's a socially sensitive behaviour, we can't directly observe unfaithfulness.
So we have to rely on what people tell us.
And we know
that there are gender differences in how people report sexual behaviours.
So the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles is a large probability survey of people aged 16 to 74 living in Britain.
And people are randomly selected to
be invited to participate.
People are asked less sensitive questions initially, for example, about how they learned about sex, their general health, contraception use.
And then for the more sensitive questions, for example, about the numbers of partners they've had, the type of sexual practices they engage in, we use self-interview.
So the respondent reads the question from a laptop screen and answers their response directly into the computer.
Well, there have been two previous NatSAL studies, and we didn't actually ask people outright, have you been unfaithful?
Instead, we've used the dates of first and most recent sex with their most recent partners.
And we look then to see if the dates overlap, to see if there's any evidence that perhaps those partnerships were overlapping.
We do.
Infidelity is quite a loaded word, whereas thinking about overlapping partnerships is more appropriate when we're thinking about the epidemiological context of these data.
We're thinking, for example, about the importance of overlapping partnerships or concurrency for the transmission of sexually transmitted infections and HIV.
Using that method, we found last time in 2000 that 15% of men had had overlapping or concurrent partnerships in the last year, in contrast to 9% of women.
So there is a gender difference, and that is actually statistically significant.
There is evidence as well to suggest that there could well be a gender difference in unfaithfulness when we think about the age difference between sexual partners.
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