Let’s Talk about Sex, Maybe: Interviewers, Respondents, Sexual Behavior Reporting and Social Life in Rural South Africa

Nicole Angotti, University of Colorado at Boulder
Brian Houle, University of Colorado at Boulder
Xavier Gómez-Olivé, University of the Witwatersrand

When it comes to the topic of sex, analysts are often skeptical. And with good reason: respondents may lie or forget the juicy details of their intimate lives, and interviewers may exercise authority in how they capture it. In between the two lies a more fundamental problem endemic to social life: how people appear to others is never unmediated nor unfiltered. In this paper we use data from a cross-sectional HIV prevalence and sexual behavior survey conducted in 2010-2011 in a rural African setting to explore the broader question of who-says-what-to-whom about their sexual lives. Preliminary results show a consistent age effect across outcomes-- that respondents report more “moral”, responsible sexual behavior to older fieldworkers; and a curious sex effect-- that men report more sexual partners to female fieldworkers. Understanding fieldworker effects on the production of sexual behavior survey data serves both methodological and theoretical goals.