Sexual Health in America (2017)

I did a couple of research projects using the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS), a nationally representative US questionnaire from 1992 that includes the highest response rates ever attained in a large survey for questions regarding sexual health and behaviours. The data is obviously very interesting and is, of course, to be taken with the whole container of salt (97.5% of the sample report being heterosexual and men report having 3 times as many sexual partners on average than women...something doesn't add up). Unfortunately, the age range for the survey is 18-59, cutting off the late life period which is often of great interest. One project of mine concerned the correlates and health trajectories of those who report being sexually touched as children, and another concerned the prevalence of sexual dysfunctions and their interaction with self-reported health.

Results for the sexual dysfunction project indicated that women have a higher average number of sexual dysfunctions than men but that this number decreases into mid-life whereas it increases constantly for men as they age. I found self-rated health, prepubertal sexual touching, and stress to be important predictors of dysfunction in both men and women while other factors are observed to vary in importance and significance among men and women. Measures of socioeconomic status were largely insignificant. I am led to suspect that the prevalence of a female sexual dysfunction count follows a third-order polynomial relation, increasing into the twenties and then decreasing until late life where dysfunction occurs due to frailty, immobility, and other reasons unlike men who have a strictly increasing prevalence of dysfunction over time. While the descriptives don't lie (except they do for sensitive questions which are also subject to recall bias), my models have too many flaws to be taken seriously since issues of confounding aren't taken seriously into account.

"The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard." - John Tukey