Distributions of number of sexual partnerships have power law decaying tails and finite variance

TL;DR

This paper examines the distribution of sexual partnerships, revealing that the data have power law tails with finite variance, challenging previous interpretations and analyses.

Contribution

It provides a re-analysis of datasets on sexual partnerships, clarifying the distribution characteristics and addressing potential misinterpretations by prior studies.

Findings

Partnership distributions have power law tails with finite variance

Previous claims about the data may be misleading

Re-analysis clarifies the true nature of the distribution

Abstract

In a recent paper, James Holland Jones and Mark Handcock re-analyze two of the four datasets comprising a database, first analyzed by us, which records the number of distinct sexual partners for Swedish men and women. We argue that the claims of Jones and Handcock can be interpreted in a misleading fashion.