Date: 2/18/2013
Creator: Cape Town Programs
Source: The Journal of Sex Research
Date of Publication: February 2003
Source Type: Literature
Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12806529

Summary:
Literature on self-reported sexual behaviors and attitudes consistently follows the trend of males being more sexually permissive than females.  This falls in line with sex stereotypes, such as males engaging in more sexual behaviors and attitudes than females.

This article describes an experiment conducted to test the validity of these sex differences, with the hypothesis that males tend to exaggerate/females have the tendency to understate their sexual behaviors while self-reporting.  The experiment utilizes a bogus pipeline condition, which leads participants to believe that false answers are easily detected by a polygraph, therefore controlling the number of false responses given.  The results supports the idea that males and females use societal gender expectations when self-reporting sexual attitudes and behaviors, particularly for females.  It was shown that sex differences were smallest in the bogus pipeline condition, out of the three conditions presented in the experiment.

Implications:
This is something to keep in mind when we process and evaluate questionnaires concerning sexual attitudes and behaviors and compare statistics between males and females, specifically for the GOAL trial.  The GOAL trial is the 3-year randomized control trial (RCT) that Grassroot Soccer is conducting to measure the efficacy of our programs on the incidence of HIV and HSV-2.