Race and Religion in Adolescent Sexual Norms and Conduct

描述（由申请人提供）：在美国，大约80%的年轻人在青少年时期的某个时候有过性行为（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%的人报告有四个或更多的性伴侣，而白人男性青年和西班牙裔男性青年的这一比例分别为12%和23% （CDC 2000）。宗教是影响性行为的一个重要途径，但却鲜为人知。宗教是许多青少年生活的重要组成部分，它也因种族/民族而异：55%的非裔美国青年说宗教对他们非常重要，而白人青年只有24% （Johnston et al. 1999）。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系产生了兴趣。宗教可以以多种方式影响青少年的性行为及其实践：它可以影响人们对避孕、允许的婚前性活动、色情作品的使用和同性恋的态度和信仰，也可以通过对友谊选择（即选择）、约会模式等的影响间接影响性行为（华莱士和威廉姆斯，1997年）。宗教最终如何以这些方式促进这些性价值观和性行为，并不像这张可能的关系列表所推断的那样为人所知。此外，很少有关于宗教和性行为之间关系的彻底的种族/民族比较——尽管宗教在种族/民族之间存在明显的差异——对已知关系的解释就更少了。这个提议的项目在解读这些关系的方向上迈出了坚实的一步，并通过综合一个关于介导的和偶然的宗教对性行为的影响的概念模型来寻求解释——这种影响被认为是受个人对性的态度和学校对规范性性行为的“气候”的影响——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。并辅以国家青年与宗教研究（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).