When being asked about the number of partners they have had, sex workers and sexual assault survivors may not want to include their clients or their rapist. Does anyone have questions they have used or suggestions for how to word survey questions to take this into account? How do we give survey respondents permission to leave these sexual partners out of the total and do so in a sensitive way?
One possibility is prefacing these questions with a brief explanation that the questions refer to consenting partners, since reaching age of majority, and excluding any sex work.
Your data will be noisier if you leave it up to the respondent to include or not. If you want to focus on consenting sexual behavior outside of sex work, then I would recommend specifying.
My recommendation is that for sensitive topics (e.g., prostitution, rape, high risk sexual behaviors) you do not rely upon questionnaires. A superior approach would be interviews after you have established a great deal of rapport with your informants. This qualitative technique will yield much richer data.
I agree with the responses above. You should clearly indicate what you define as sex partner in the questions or their preface because this will vary across respondents. (For instance, some people wouldn't count someone with whom they only had oral sex as a sex partner but others would.) I also think that interviewer-administered questionnaires are best for questions about numbers of partners, what behavior was done with partners, etc. Otherwise, you may stumble upon a lot of incoherent responses.
However, I also wonder what is your rationale for wanting to distinguish paid and non-consensual partners; this would help answering the question. For example, if you're doing epidemiological research on STIs, you'd want to know how many people a respondent had sexual contact with, even if paid or non-consensual. (Otherwise, you might end up with a respondent who reports zero sex partners but also reports an STI diagnosis.)
Further, asking respondents to leave out certain types of partners is not necessarily sensitive. I work on studies with sex workers and I don't know that they would want to participate in a study about sexual behavior that would ask them to exclude that dimension of their experience.
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