Telling tails explain the discrepancy in sexual partner reports

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Abstract
AN anomaly often noted in surveys of sexual behaviour is that the number of female sexual partners reported by men exceeds the number of male partners reported by women1–3. This discrepancy is sometimes interpreted as evidence that surveys produce unreli-able data due to sex-linked response and sampling bias. We report here that among the 90% of respondents reporting fewer than 20 lifetime partners, however, the ratio of male to female reports drops from 3.2:1 to 1.2:1. The anomaly thus appears to be driven by the upper tail of the contact distribution, an example of the general principle of outlier influence in data analysis. The implica-tion is that sexual behaviour surveys provide reliable data in the main, and that simple improvements can increase precision in the upper tail to make these data more useful for modelling the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

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