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Adolescent Sexuality and Positive Well-Being: A Group-Norms Approach

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Abstract

The link between adolescent sexual activity and psychological well-being is a controversial issue in developmental psychology. This cross-sectional study investigated the association between three aspects of teenage sexuality (genital sexual experience, age of sexual onset, and number of sex partners) and positive well-being (hedonic, eudaimonic, and overall) in a sample of 475 high school seniors (48% female; 89% White) from a single school district in a rural upstate New York community. Based on a group-norms perspective, we expected higher well-being in adolescents whose sexual behaviors followed group-normative patterns. As expected, sexually experienced and on-time (at age 16) students reported higher well-being than sexually inexperienced or late-onset (17 or older) students. Contrary to expectations, a high number of sex partners and an early sexual onset (15 or younger) were not related to lower well-being. Early-onset girls reported higher levels of well-being than normative-onset peers. Findings are discussed in relationship to theoretical perspectives and past empirical findings of teenage sexuality as a developmental asset versus risk.

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Notes

  1. Due to concerns within the participating school, no additional questions regarding sexual activity were asked.

  2. Three students (two men and one woman) reported more than 30 partners (between 50 and 100). Because these constitute outliers, we initially ran all analyses both including and excluding these individuals. All results were identical. In the interest of preserving statistical power, we chose to keep these participants in the analytic sample.

  3. We also ran regressions with number of partners as a continuous predictor of the three well-being outcomes. Prior to analyses, all responses of more than 20 partners (6 cases) were recoded to 20 to reduce the impact of outliers; the variable was then log transformed to reduce non-normality. Results were not significant for any outcomes in either sex. Tables available on request.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Dr. Andrew Smiler for his assistance in designing the study and data collection, to the upstate New York State school district and school staff who were extraordinarily cooperative, to Vickie Liang for help with data preparation, and for financial support provided by Federal Formula Funds Research No. 2007-08-077 to the second author. This research was supported in part by the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station federal formula funds, Project No. NYC-321416, received from the National Institutes for Food and Agriculture (NIFA,) U.S. Department of Agriculture. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

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  1. Department of Human Development, Martha Van Rensselaer Hall, College of Human Ecology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853-4401, USA

    Zhana Vrangalova & Ritch C. Savin-Williams

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  1. Zhana Vrangalova
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  2. Ritch C. Savin-Williams
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Correspondence to Zhana Vrangalova.

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Vrangalova, Z., Savin-Williams, R.C. Adolescent Sexuality and Positive Well-Being: A Group-Norms Approach. J Youth Adolescence 40, 931–944 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-011-9629-7

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