Sexual Identity, April 2009 - March 2010

Statistics on sexual identity from the Integrated Household Survey (IHS) include data for Wales for the financial year 2009-2010.

The sexual identity question was developed and tested on a number of surveys in 2008 and launched on the IHS in 2009. The IHS is the first ONS survey that has been used to produce data on sexual identity. This is a more detailed bulletin based on data originally released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on 23 September 201, when a summary headline was released on the Statistics for Wales website. This bulletin provides analysis of the data for Wales however the figures should be treated with caution due to small sample sizes.

The Integrated Household Survey (IHS) is a composite household survey comprised of a core suite of questions from six current ONS household surveys and contains information from nearly 450,000 individual respondents across the UK, including 40,000 in Wales.

The key results are:

• In Wales, 95.2 per cent of people identified as heterosexual/straight, 1.2 per cent as gay/lesbian/bisexual, and 0.4 per cent as other whilst 3.2 per cent did not know, answer or respond to the question.
• Of those people in Wales who identified as gay/lesbian/bisexual over two thirds were under 45 years of age (71.7 per cent).
• Around three times as many females as males identified as bisexual (73.7 per cent and 26.3 per cent respectively) whilst just under two thirds of people who identified as gay/lesbian were males (63.5 per cent).

ONS intends to publish the rolling IHS dataset quarterly and submit the survey for assessment to become a National Statistic by the UK Statistics Authority in 2012.

Revision note

The data in this bulletin was revised following reweighting of the Integrated Household Survey by the Office for National Statistics. The revised bulletin was published on 31st March 2011.

Contact

Tel: 029 2082 6023
E-mail: stats.popcensus@wales.gsi.gov.uk

Next update

Not a regular output