Original articlesOlder boyfriends of adolescent girls: The cause or a sign of the problem?
Section snippets
Sample
The National Longitudinal Study of Health (Add Health) is a nationally representative study of adolescents in grades 7 through 12 in the United States [20]. These data were collected by the Carolina Population Center to explore a multitude of adolescent health issues, including physical and psychological well-being, risky behaviors, and violence; and the interplay between adolescent health and varying social contexts, such as familial, peer, educational, and neighborhood. A complete description
Results
The 670 girls eligible for analysis were primarily white (69%), with an average age of 14.9 years at the first wave of data collection (see Table 1). The median annual household income was approximately $48,400, with the most common parental education levels being high school diploma or GED (29%), some college (19%), college graduate (18%), and graduate or professional school (16%). On average, respondents’ romantic partners in Wave II were roughly 1 year older (mean age difference = 1.06
Discussion
The goals of this study were to (a) explore the causal relationship between adolescent girls’ sexual activity and having an older boyfriend and (b) contextualize the relationship between these two variables within a larger framework of adolescent problem behavior. By comparing various structural equation models, we were able to address these two aims. In terms of the first aim, our findings indicate that the psychosocial characteristics of adolescent girls at Wave I predicted whether they
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2014, Child Abuse and NeglectCitation Excerpt :This study examined partner age gaps among low-income, at-risk adolescents to better understand the outcomes associated with dating older partners among adolescents most likely to come to the attention of service providers. In support of the notion that dating older partners is associated with sexual risk, the wider the age gap between youth and their partners, the more likely youth were to engage in sexual intercourse with their partner, and then the less likely they were to use protection against pregnancy and STIs (Landry & Forrest, 1995; indberg et al., 1997; Young & d’Arcy, 2005). In addition, the wider the age gap between adolescents and their romantic partners, the more likely the adolescents were to experience physical, emotional, and sexual victimization by their partners over the course of the relationship.
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2012, Social Science and MedicineCitation Excerpt :Not only is the individual's age important in the involvement and expression of romantic relationships, the age of the romantic partner is an important consideration since significant proportions of adolescent partnerships are characterized by age differences of two or more years (Kaestle, Morisky, & Wiley, 2002). Evidence suggests that having older boyfriends is associated with increased problem behavior for young women (Young & d'Arcy, 2005) and specifically with minor deviance or delinquent behavior (Haynie, 2002). Halpern, Kaestle, and Hallfors (2007), using data from Add Health, found that when older male partners were partnered with young females (under age 15), significant increases in multiple risk behavior (i.e. substance use and sexual risk behavior) were noted in the young women.