A new scale for measuring dynamic patterns of sexual partnership and concurrency: application to three French Caribbean regions.

Background: Quantitative assessment of multiple sexual partnerships and concurrency may help to elucidate the large observed differences in the prevalence of AIDS among population subgroups and countries.

Goal: The goals of the study were (1) to develop a global scale of dynamic patterns of sexual partnerships, including concurrency with new partners and stable concurrency; (2) to apply this scale to three Caribbean regions characterized by different cumulative rates of incidence of AIDS; and (3) to compare the concurrency rates given by this scale with those of other published methods.

Study Design: We defined an individual scale based on 6 patterns of sexual behavior over the previous 12-month period, by using a simple algorithm to combine 7 variables.