ABSTRACT
In Europe, as in North America, gay communities were the first to be affected and to engage in the fight against AIDS. In this chapter, the authors describe the surveys that will be compared in the book, with special attention given to the diversity of questionnaire orientations and contents and the sampling and data collection techniques involved. Social scientists have been discouraged from studying sexuality by preconceptions, normative discourses and beliefs that no reliable information on this intimate topic can or should be obtained from the population, to name just a few of the obstacles that have made research in a field difficult. There were important differences in the interview techniques used by different European investigators. Face-to-face interviews predominate but the telephone was used widely, while self-completion was used in many surveys, either as the sole survey technique or more often to complement face-to-face interviews.
