Race and Religion in Adolescent Sexual Norms and Conduct

描述(由申请人提供)：在美国，大约80%的年轻人在他们十几岁的时候有过性行为(Singh And Darroch 1999)。许多性行为因种族/民族而异：30%的黑人男性青年报告在13岁之前有过性行为，48%的人报告有过四个或更多的性伴侣，相比之下，白人男性青年的这一比例为12%，西班牙裔青年的这一比例为23%(CDC 2000)。宗教是形成性行为的一个重要但鲜为人知的途径。宗教是许多青少年生活中至关重要的一部分，而且它也因种族/族裔而异：55%的非裔美国青年表示宗教对他们非常重要，而白人青年中只有24%(Johnston等人)。1999年)。直到最近，人口统计学、医学界和公共卫生界才对宗教和卫生实践之间的联系产生了兴趣。宗教可以(与确实不同)以多种方式影响青春期性行为及其实践：宗教可能影响关于避孕、允许的婚前性活动、色情制品的使用和同性恋的态度和信念，以及通过影响友谊选择(即选择)、约会模式等间接影响性行为(Wallace和Williams 1997)。宗教最终如何以这些方式促成这样的性价值观和行为，并不像这一系列可能的关系所推断的那样广为人知。此外，关于宗教与性行为之间关系的种族/族裔比较很少--尽管宗教因种族/族裔而有明显差异--对已知的关系提供的解释更少。这个拟议的项目在破译这些关系和寻求解释的方向上迈出了坚实的一步，通过综合一个关于中介和或有宗教对性行为的影响的概念模型-这些影响被认为受到个人对性的态度以及学校对规范性行为的“气候”的影响-利用来自国家青少年健康纵向研究的丰富的个人、网络和学校数据，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).