ABSTRACT
<p><b>OBJECTIVE</b>To estimate the size of female sex workers and clients in Taizhou city.</p><p><b>METHODS</b>A household survey using network scale-up method (NSUM) was conducted among the 3000 community residents in Taizhou city from August to October in 2011, which aimed to estimate the social network size (c value) of Taizhou residents, and the c value was adjusted by demographic characteristics, back estimation and outlier elimination. Using the adjusted c value, the number of acquaintance of female sex workers or clients and the respect level toward female sex workers or clients were used to estimate the size of female sex workers and clients.</p><p><b>RESULTS</b>A total of 2783 valid questionnaires were collected, among which 1380 (49.6%) were collected from Taixing city, 1403 (50.4%) were collected from Jingjiang city. 1334 respondents were male (47.9%) and 1449 (47.9%) respondents were female. The mean age was (39.4 ± 10.7) years. The average personal social network size using original data for Taizhou residents was 525, which differed from place, sex, age, educational level and marriage status. Using the remaining known populations through back estimation, the social network size was 419 and became 424 after the elimination of outliers. The estimated population size for female sex worker was 6370 (95%CI: 5886 - 6853), which accounted for 0.52% (6370/1 229 980) of the total number of female aged from 15 to 49. The estimated population size for clients was 15 202 (95%CI: 14 560 - 15 847), which accounted for 1.28% (15 202/1 190 340) of the total number of males aged from 15 to 49 and the ration of clients to female sex worker was 2.39:1.</p><p><b>CONCLUSION</b>NSUM is an easy and quick way to estimate the size of female sex workers or clients, but the estimated sizes are subject to bias and error due to estimate effect and sample representativeness.</p>
Subject(s)
Adolescent , Adult , Female , Humans , Male , Middle Aged , Young Adult , China , Sex Work , Sex Workers , Surveys and QuestionnairesABSTRACT
Objective To estimate the size of men who have sex with men (MSM) in Chongqing municipality.Methods A community based investigation was conducted in Chongqing to estimate the number of personal social network (c value) in the general population through the network scale-up method (NSUM).All the participants were selected by multistage sampling randomly.Factors as c value,the number of acquaintance of MSM and its respective coefficient were used to estimate and adjust the size of MSM in Chongqing.Results The average size of personal social network for Chongqing residents was 330,with differences among place(P＜0.001),sex (P＜0.0001),age (P＜0.0001),education level (P＜0.0001).The size of social network changed into 310 after the adjustment on demography,back estimation and elimination of the outliers.The estimated population size for MSM was 16 767 after the adjustment according to the respective levels,with 95％CI from 14 602 to 18 932,which accounted for 0.21％ of the total number of males,aged from 15 to 49 in Chongqing municipality.Conclusion NSUM was a new method for estimation of population size,which seemed worthy in promoting the practice of NSUM for its efficiency.