Race and Religion in Adolescent Sexual Norms and Conduct

描述（申请人提供）：在美国，大约80%的年轻人在青少年时期的某个时候发生过性行为（Singh和Darroch 1999）。许多性行为因种族/民族而异：30%的黑人男性青年报告说在13岁之前有过性行为，48%的人报告说有四个或更多的性伴侣，而白色男性青年的这一比例为12%，西班牙裔男性青年的这一比例为23%（CDC 2000）。一个重要的，但鲜为人知的，塑造性行为的途径是宗教。宗教是许多青少年生活中至关重要的一部分，它也因种族/民族而异：55%的非洲裔美国青年说宗教对他们非常重要，而只有24%的白色青年说宗教对他们非常重要（约翰斯顿等人，1999年）。直到最近，人口统计学、医学和公共卫生界才对宗教与健康实践之间的关联感兴趣。宗教可以通过多种方式影响青少年的性行为及其实践：它可能影响对避孕的态度和信仰，允许婚前性活动，使用色情制品和同性恋，以及通过对友谊选择的影响间接影响性行为（即，选择），约会模式等（华莱士和威廉姆斯1997）。宗教最终如何以这些方式促成这种性价值观和性行为，并不像这一系列可能的关系所推断的那样为人所知。此外，几乎没有对宗教和性行为之间的关系进行彻底的种族/民族比较-尽管宗教在种族/民族方面存在明显的差异-对已知关系的解释更少。这个拟议的项目采取了一个坚实的一步，在破译这些关系的方向，并寻求解释，通过综合一个概念模型的介导和偶然的宗教影响的性行为-影响被认为是受个人态度的性以及学校的“气候”规范的性行为-与丰富的个人，网络，和来自国家青少年健康纵向研究的学校数据，以及来自国家青年和宗教研究（NSYR）的新数据。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In the United States, about 80 percent of young people have had sexual intercourse at some point during their teenage years (Singh and Darroch 1999). A number of sexual behaviors vary by race/ethnicity: 30 percent of black male youth report having had intercourse before age 13, and 48 percent report having had four or more sex partners, compared with 12 percent of white male youth and 23 percent of Hispanic male youth (CDC 2000). One important, but poorly understood, pathway that shapes sexual practice is religion. Religion is a vital part of many adolescents' lives, and it, too, varies by race/ethnicity: 55 percent of African American youth say religion is very important to them, compared with only 24 percent of white youth (Johnston et al. 1999). Only recently have the demographic, medical, and public health communities taken an interest in the association between religion and health practices. There are numerous ways in which religion could (as distinct from does) affect adolescent sexuality and its practice: it may factor into attitudes and beliefs about contraception, permissible premarital sexual activities, use of pornography, and homosexuality, as well as indirectly affect sexual behavior through its effects on friendship choices (i.e., selection), dating patterns, etc. (Wallace and Williams 1997). How religion ultimately contributes to such sexual values and behaviors in these ways is not as well known as this list of possible relationships may infer. Moreover, there have been few thorough race/ethnic comparisons of the relationship between religion and sexual behavior - despite religion's clear differences by race/ethnicity- and even fewer explanations offered for the relationships that are known. This proposed project takes a solid step in the direction of deciphering those relationships and pursuing explanations by synthesizing a conceptual model about mediated and contingent religious effects on sexual behavior- effects that are thought to be subject to both personal attitudes about sex as well as school "climates" about normative sexual behavior - with rich individual, network, and school data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, supplemented by new data from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR).