Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 15, 1993 TAG: 9304150102
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By The Washington Post
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
RESPONSES ON CONDOM USE ENCOURAGING TO RESEARCHERS
One of the most comprehensive surveys of the sexual behaviors and attitudes of American men in their 20s and 30s has found that:
Just 2.3 percent - far less than the 10 percent figure usually cited - say they have ever had sex with another man, and less than half of these (1.1 percent) report being exclusively homosexual.
About 71 percent think the risk of getting AIDS from a single act of intercourse with an HIV-infected woman is about 500 times higher than medical research indicates.
The median number of female sex partners the men said they ever had was 7.3. Just over 23 percent said they have had 20 or more partners, and 28 percent said they had one, two or three. Only 4.6 percent said they had never had vaginal intercourse.
Three-quarters agreed with the statement that using a condom "shows you are a caring person," whereas 15 percent said it "makes your partner think you have AIDS."
The findings, published today in the journal Family Planning Perspectives, are among hundreds obtained in one of the largest studies of male sexual behavior ever undertaken.
The researchers, demographers at the Battelle Human Affairs Research Centers in Seattle, based their findings on face-to-face interviews during 1991 with 3,321 men chosen from across the country to represent all American men aged 20 through 39.
"This study has come up with some very encouraging findings on condom use that we haven't seen before," said Christine Bachrach, chief of the Demographic and Behavioral Sciences Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which funded the $1.8 million, four-year study.
The fact that so many men felt that condom use showed they were "caring" sex partners "is very encouraging," she said. "Taking advantage of that feeling may be the way to go in promoting more use of condoms to prevent sexually transmitted diseases." At the same time, the significant number of men who felt condom use signaled AIDS "tells us another point we can work on," she said.