Abstract
A social psychology of problem behavior was employed to account for variation in an aspect of development—the transition from virginity to nonvirginity. Personality, perceived environment, and behavioral measures were collected by questionnaires administered annually to high school and college males and females. In cross-sectional comparisons, nonvirgins differed from virgins in the theoretically expected transition-prone direction, including higher value on independence, lower value on achievement, greater social criticism and tolerance of deviance, and greater friends’ models for deviance. In longitudinal comparisons, virgins who were to become non-virgins in the subsequent year were already significantly more transition-prone on these antecedent measures than virgins who were to remain virgins. The results were stronger at the high school than at the college level, and for females than for males.
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Jessor, S. L., & Jessor, R. (1975). Transition from virginity to nonvirginity among youth: A social-psychological study over time. Developmental Psychology, 11(4), 473–484.
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Notes
- 1.
Since, in 1970, our high school sample was distributed over Grades 8, 9, and 10, only the latter subgroup was asked about intercourse. In 1971, the sample was in Grades 9, 10, and 11; thus, the latter two subgroups were asked about intercourse in this year. It is only in 1972, when all students had reached senior high school, that questions about sex were asked of all participants. These circumstances were necessitated by requirements of the testing agreement with the local school officials and by the inappropriateness of certain questions for younger-age students.
- 2.
In general, the intraindividual consistency across the testing years in reports of sexual experience was very high. There were, however, a small number of students whose responses to the question were inconsistent across at least 2 years of reporting. For these students, a careful appraisal by three judges was made of all of their questionnaires, and a consensual classification was developed for each one. Comparisons, subsequently made, of the social-psychological scores for these students with the mean scores of the groups to which they had been assigned strongly supported the appropriateness of the judgments.
- 3.
A similar analysis, designed to hold age constant by dealing only with each grade subgroup’s data when it was in tenth grade, yielded a very similar pattern of virgin-nonvirgin differences.
- 4.
In order to rule out possible differences in social background, the virgin and nonvirgin students were also compared on fundamentalism of mother’s religious group membership and on the Hollingshead Index of Social Position. There were no differences in family religious background at either the high school or college level for either males or females. With regard to the Hollingshead Index, there were no differences for males or females at the college level; at the high school level, male nonvirgins had lower scores than virgins, and there was a trend in the same direction for females. However, examination of the components of the index shows that father’s education for both groups averages at least some college, and father’s occupation for both groups averages above skilled labor. In view of these data, variation in social background was not considered a likely contributor to the social-psychological differences that emerge in the virgin-nonvirgin comparisons.
- 5.
The contribution to the transition groups from each grade was as follows: for the males, 16% of tenth graders, 19% of eleventh graders, and 15% of twelfth graders; for the females, the percentages were 20%, 29%, and 29%, respectively. Thus, the transition rates by grade are quite similar.
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Acknowledgments
This study is part of a larger longitudinal research project, “The Socialization of Problem Behavior in Youth,” supported by NIAAA Grant AA-00232, R. Jessor, principal investigator. The thoughtful assistance in data analyses of John McMorran, Robert Burton, Carole Thorn, John Finney, and John Rohrbaugh is gratefully acknowledged. We have gained much from the preliminary project reports by Laurie Laitin and Mary I. Collins, and we are indebted to Keith E. Davis for his critical reading of the manuscript.
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Jessor, S.L., Jessor, R. (2017). The Transition to Sexual Intercourse Experience. In: Problem Behavior Theory and Adolescent Health . Advancing Responsible Adolescent Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51349-2_14
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