To Whom it May Concern,

My name is Scott Cunningham.  I am an academic economist at Baylor University, and I specialize in economic studies of sexual behavior.  For those interested, you can access my website at:

http://business.baylor.edu/Scott_Cunningham/Home.html

I am currently, with another economist, studying the escort business, and how the growth in the Internet has changed this business in the United States.  From a scientific point of view, there has been very little research done on professional escorts by researchers .  We are interested in correcting this by interviewing several hundred women to learn more about the determinants of escort wages and practices.  The primary source we’ll be using to contact women for this survey is through TER.

We suspect that there are many unanticipated challenges to conducting telephone interviews with professional escorts.  To help us overcome these potential problems before they arise, we wanted to contact women in the community to get their opinions as to the kinds of potential pitfalls we should avoid in trying to conduct this survey.  We had a few specific questions, but we also wanted to get some general advice from anyone reading this, too.  Here were some of our questions:

1. Will escorts be willing to participate in such a survey?  
a. If not, why not?  In other words, what would keep an escort from participating in this survey?
b. What can we do to improve our chances of getting participation in this telephone survey?

2. We will be asking women sensitive information related to specific transactions and the services offered during those transactions.  Everything we ask is both confidential and anonymous, but we nonetheless will be requesting honest answers to sensitive information.  As we write the survey, what can the TER community recommend in terms of certain phrases and words that we should avoid?  

Thanks, and I encourage you to please read this email and respond with any advice you may have.  I would appreciate any help you can offer us.

Sincerely,


Scott Cunningham

may easily be a police sting.

You can determine market rates for sex quite easily by doing a search of the websites of the gals who are listed on TER reviews board.  No VIP is even needed to access their sites.

Good luck on getting any provider to talk to you. Most that I know are very protective of their privacy, plus they have no way of knowing whether or not this is a law enforcement sweep, disguised as a "survey." ('Sting,' in other words.)

Let's contact everyone who has a warrant out for their arrest and tell them they've won a prize. All they have to do is come to our location and pick up their prize.....ooops I think this has been done before.

Just an illustration about why people who are involved in illegal activities are loathe to respond to "surveys".

(What's Init For Me?)

So What's In it For Them? I can't speak for any provider, but what do they have to gain by opening theselves to exposure and risk (no matter how reassuring you are).


-- Modified on 7/7/2008 1:01:09 PM

primary research.!!!

As you're hearing, a telephone survey will never work.  But good that you realize the problems with data collected from arrests or drop-in and STD testing centers.

Get a VIP membership and write a script to harvest the online profiles.  Rates and services are listed.  

It's unclear to me why you think the self-reporting would be superior.  Extra charges by the same lady for additional services (a la carte pricing if you will) is not that common.  You should expect the variation to come from different providers.  If you are trying to get a handle on BBFS similar to Gertler's work, you won't find the data here.  But I seriously doubt you will get much via a survey either.  The best you'll get is an estimate for oral sex with and without a condom.  Might be an interesting number.

On top of being very careful about any info they give out....most just don't have the time to sit on the phone and take a survey!  They aren't going to mail it in, and doing it online where the IP address can be traced won't work either.  Good luck with this one...actually I take that back....there are enough people doing their little "expose"s_ ...leave the ladies alone and find something more appealing to the "General" public to write about

Yeah, you'll have much better success doing a survery of steroids in sports.

That's a good one!