As part of the roadmap set out in the Sexual Health Strategy, launched in 2011, the Department of Health Information and Research (DHIR) is launching a nationwide sexual health survey on the subject amongst all Maltese residents aged between sixteen and forty, with the approval of the Health Ethics Committee, which has reviewed both the questionnaire and the subjects to be included in the study.

The survey will be concentrating mostly on behaviour, knowledge and other social indicators on the subject. The younger population, aged 16 to 18, will also be asked for feedback on their sexual health education, since they are likely to be the most familiar with the current forms of sexual health education in Malta.

Due to its sensitive nature, the survey will deviate from the traditional model of a random population sample from an existing population register. It will be administered using probability quota sampling. This implies that trained interviewers will be approaching subjects at random from across Malta and Gozo, depending on their gender, age, level of education and area of residence, until a representative sample of the Maltese resident population is achieved. The quotas have been preset based on existing sources of information describing the distribution of these demographic factors in Malta.

Participants in this survey will also be receiving a little token of appreciation and will be entitled to participate in a lottery to win an iPad2.

This will be the first exercise in the research plan devised by this strategy. Other sectors of the population will be addressed at a later stage, using different methodologies known to work better for data collection among the specific groups.

Further queries on the subject can be addressed to sexualhealthsurvey.mhec@gov.mt.

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