transmission will depend on how often contacts occur. If we want to
understand contagion, we therefore need to work out how we interact
with one another. However, it’s a task that turns out to be remarkably
difficult.
‘T ,’ announced the headline in The
Sunday Times. It was September 1989, and the government had just
blocked a proposal to study sexual behaviour in the UK. Faced with a
growing epidemic, researchers had become increasingly aware of
the importance of sexual encounters. The problem was that nobody
really knew how common these encounters were. ’We had no idea of
the parameter estimates that would drive an epidemic of ,’ Anne
Johnson, one of the researchers who’d proposed the UK study, later
said. ‘We didn’t know what proportion of the population had gay
partners, we didn’t know the number of partners that people had.’[11]
In the mid-1980s, a group of health researchers had come up with
the idea of measuring sexual behaviour on a national scale. They’d
run a successful pilot study, but had struggled to get the main survey
off the ground. There were reports that Margaret Thatcher had vetoed
government funding, believing that the study would intrude into
people’s private lives, leading to ‘unseemly speculation’. Fortunately,
there was another option. Shortly after The Sunday Times article
came out, the team secured independent support from the Wellcome
Trust.
The National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles – or Natsal
- would eventually run in 1990, then again in 2000 and 2010.
According to Kaye Wellings, who helped develop the study, it was
clear the data would have applications beyond STIs. ‘Even as we
were writing the proposal, I think we realised that it was going to
answer a whole host of questions of relevance to public health policy,
which there hadn’t been data available to answer before.’ In recent
years, Natsal has provided insights into a whole range of social
issues, from birth control to marriage breakdowns.
Still, it wasn’t easy to get people talking about their sex lives.
Interviewers had to persuade people to take part – often by
emphasising the benefits for wider society – and build enough trust