Heterosexual Sexual Behaviour: Findings from the 2014/15 New Zealand Health Survey

Published online: 
15 November 2019
Heterosexual Sexual Behaviour.

This report describes heterosexual sexual activities (that is, sexual activities between men and women) in New Zealand with regard to gender, age, ethnicity and neighbourhood deprivation patterns. Over 10,000 respondents aged 16–74 years completed the sexual and reproductive health module in the 2014/15 Health Survey.

Use our Sexual and Reproductive Health Data Explorer to see the results from the 2014/15 Health Survey.

If you have any queries please email [email protected].

Overview of key findings

  • Most adults (89 percent) had had heterosexual sex; there was minimal variation by gender, ethnicity and neighbourhood deprivation.
  • In the year preceding the survey, 75 percent of men and 68 percent of women had had vaginal sex, 59 percent of men and 49 percent of women had had oral sex, and 10 percent of men and 6.8 percent of women had had anal sex.
  • Men were 1.3 times as likely as women to have had two or more partners in the last year.
  • 21 percent of men who had had two or more partners in the last year used a condom at the most recent time they had had sex, compared with 12 percent of women.
  • Men and women aged 16–24 years were less likely to have ever had heterosexual sex, but, if they had, were more likely to have had multiple partners in the last year.
  • Asian women generally said they had had lower levels of heterosexual sexual activity than non-Asian women. For example, they were 0.4 times as likely to have had multiple partners in the last year as non-Asian women; they were also 0.4 times as likely to have had anal sex in the last year, and 0.7 times as likely to have had oral sex in the last year.
  • Neighbourhood deprivation was associated with numbers of partners: women from high-deprivation areas had 3.6 times, and men from those areas 2.9 times, the mean number of partners in the last year as those from the least deprived areas.

Go to Sexual and reproductive health to find out what’s being done in this area.


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Publishing information

  • Date of publication:
    15 November 2019
  • ISBN:
    978-1-98-859745-4
  • HP number:
    7269
  • Citation:
    Ministry of Health. 2019. Heterosexual Sexual Behaviour: Findings from the 2014/15 New Zealand Health Survey. Wellington: Ministry of Health.
  • Ordering information:
    Only soft copy available to download
  • Copyright status:

    Owned by the Ministry of Health and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence.

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