Original articleUsing Sibling Differences to Estimate Effects of Parenting on Adolescent Sexual Risk Behaviors
Section snippets
Sampling and data collection
Data for this investigation were drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), an annual survey study of youth in America born between 1980 and 1984. The original sample consisted of a nationally representative group of 8984 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 16 years drawn from 6819 unique households, with purposive oversampling of economically poor and minority youth. Adolescents have been interviewed annually since 1997, with wave 1 parent interviews and annual
Descriptives
Descriptives of study variables are presented in Table 1. The sibling subsample and total sample of adolescents had similar characteristics and levels of parenting and sexual risk behaviors. Sexual risk behaviors were skewed toward 0 but increased substantially, by about 1 SD, from mid- to late adolescence. Table 1 also presents sibling differences within families to assess within-family variability. It should be noted that the family fixed-effects models incorporate a handful of families (n =
Discussion
Previous research has revealed significant relationships between parenting practices and adolescents' engagement in risky sexual activities. Yet a host of methodological limitations have curtailed researchers' ability to assess causal links and to rule out the possibility that unmeasured heterogeneity, or bias, drives correlations between more positive and involved parenting practices and lower adolescent sexual risk behaviors [4]. The analyses presented here assessed a nationally
Conclusions
In summary, results from this study suggest that parenting and family processes may serve as important influences on adolescent risky sexual behaviors. Regular family activities may buffer adolescents, whereas negative parenting behaviors may increase adolescents' engagement in sexual risk behaviors. Given the substantial potential health and psychosocial risks of multiple sexual partners and lack of effective contraception, these findings have important implications for public health and
Acknowledgments
This research was funded by Grant 2538 from the W. T. Grant Foundation; by Grant 1R03HD055229-01A1 from the National Institutes of Health; by the generous support of a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award from the Australian-American Fulbright Commission; and by a Senior Visiting Fellow position at the Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Australia (to R.L.C.).
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