Brandon Hill, a research associate, states that people asking the question should be careful not to assume that their own definition of the phrase is shared by whoever they’re talking to. Those questioned by the institute ranged from 18 years old to 96. The respondents were given 14 choices to the sentence ‘Would you say you’d had sex with someone if the most intimate behaviour you engaged in was…’.
The study found some surprising results. Around 30 percent of adults didn’t consider oral sex to be sex and 20 percent said the same of anal sex – the age and gender of the person questioned did vary the results however. The majority of those questioned agreed that penile-vaginal intercourse coincided with their definition of sexual intercourse but surprisingly only 89 percent of these people still agreed if there was no ejaculation. For 23 percent of men aged 65 and over, even this did not describe their definition of sex.
The information gathered about one’s sexual activities is vital for health care providers to deal with sexually transmitted diseases. If a person doesn’t consider their actions to be sex, they may not consider the correct prevention for diseases such as HIV or for unplanned pregnancies. In this instance, the seemingly casual question of ‘have you had sex?’ brings with it a range of answers, which can lead to very different results.