It is quite common that in large-scale, complex, and expensive research there is a need for a free-standing paper outlining the background and methods of the study. The Australian Study of Health and Relationships (ASHR) was one such study. Using as our model such studies as the 1990 United Kingdom National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (NATSAL) and the 1992 US National Health and Social Life Survey, we generated a huge amount of data about a broad range of sexual and reproductive health outcomes from a large representative sample (N=19307). The US and UK teams opted for publishing their primary findings in scholarly books. This takes longer than publishing in a refereed journal, and is less accessible for other researchers. (To make the results more available to general readers, two members of our team, Juliet Richters and Chris Rissel, published a short book based on the findings, Doing it Down Under, in early 2005.)

We very grateful that the editors and production staff of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health agreed to join us in this venture and to apply the highest standards of peer review to all 20 papers in the issue published. In order to reduce the overall length of the issue, we decided that the substantive papers would each have a very brief methods section but refer to the primary methods paper—hence that paper’s citation rate. The primary methods paper was provided, for information, to all the reviewers of all the substantive papers to provide the necessary background as a supplement to the otherwise abbreviated methods section. While the decision to use this mode of publication allowed us to have the results in the public domain just 10 months after the completion of data collection, the strain imposed on the journal’s editors, editorial staff, their team of reviewers, and the authors was considerable. We remain grateful to Professor Stephen Duckett, Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at La Trobe University, for the suggestion of this publication strategy, and to the ten agencies that directly funded or otherwise supported the study, and our output strategy, for their continuing support and forbearance.

To suggest that the paper described a wholly new discovery or methodology would be somewhat misleading. The key achievement of the paper, apart from the purpose it serves to explain the methodology for the substantive papers, is that it provides a synthesis and offers a solution to the various methodological issues in conducting valid, reliable, population-based surveys of HIV-related, sexual and reproductive health concerns that have been identified over the past 25 years. That synthesis has been consulted by teams in other countries, not necessarily because they wanted to adopt our solutions, but to identify local analogues of global problems and to search for appropriate local solutions.

Sexual and reproductive health issues are a vital public health concern. To understand them requires asking populations about sex—an apparently taboo and difficult subject to research. This paper asks and answers a number of questions, including:

• How can you recruit people into a study?
• How can you be sure they are representative of the population and not some unusual subgroup?
• Is it better to interview by telephone or face-to-face, or perhaps have the respondent fill out a questionnaire?
• What sort of formal or informal language should you use in asking questions?
• How embarrassed or truthful will people be during the course of the interview?
• What are the limits to what can actually be asked?

The need for an Australian population-based survey of sexual and reproductive health had been recognized since the late 1980s. Chris Rissel initiated the project in late 1997 and the research team achieved its final composition in early 2001 during the final design phases. The team consisted of myself, along with Dr. Chris Rissel, University of Sydney and Central Sydney Area Health Service; Dr. Juliet Richters, National Centre in HIV Social Research, University of New South Wales; Associate Professor Andrew Grulich, National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research, University of New South Wales; and Dr. Richard de Visser, Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University, and currently Department of Psychology, University of Sussex. All of us had been working in related fields over the previous years: HIV epidemiology, women’s health, sexuality research, sexual health promotion, and the monitoring of sexual behavior among high-risk groups.