NCJ Number
136230
Journal
British Journal of Addiction Volume: 86 Dated: (1991) Pages: 1477-1483
Date Published
1991
Length
7 pages
Annotation
A recently developed method is applied to estimating the prevalence of street working female prostitution in Glasgow and the number of injecting drug users in this group.
Abstract
Prior to a description of the method, background information is provided on the role of prostitution in HIV transmission and previous efforts to estimate the prevalence of prostitution. The new method is derived from the capture/recapture approach and is based on projections from ethnographic fieldwork contacts. It depends on distinguishing new from repeated field work contacts. The increasing ratio of repeat to new contacts provides a modeling of the total street prostitutes population. The fieldwork consisted of informal interviews with 208 street prostitutes in the course of 32 field work visits regarding contact status and injecting drug use as well as HIV-related risk behavior. Refusal and field contact were less than 20 percent. After distinguishing new from repeated fieldwork contacts, the contactable population of Glasgow street prostitutes in a 6-month period (1989-1990) was estimated at 304 with 172 drug injectors and 132 non-injectors. In addition to prostitutes and injecting drug users, this method may be applicable to estimating other hidden populations. 2 figures and 20 references