The Sexual Lives of Early Adolescent Girls.

The Sexual Lives of Early Adolescent Girls, Lucia F. O'Sullivan, Columbia University 

To understand adolescent sexual behavior, it is important to examine adolescents' expectations, interpretations, and reflections upon their sexual experiences. Most research on adolescent sexuality has focused on problem behavior outcomes, such as pregnancy and STD infection among middle or late adolescent girls (Niccolai et al., 2004), resulting in a narrow perspective regarding the sexual lives of adolescents. This is particularly true of non-White adolescents. Researchers were challenged recently to take a broader perspective of sexual development (Bancroft, 2003) and to characterize the wider array of normative developmental romantic and sexual experiences rather than continue to characterize their sexual experiences as pathological, damaging, and painful. I designed this study to address among early adolescent girls a range of pre-intercourse sexual experiences, intentions, readiness, and anticipated emotions as well as recollections of first sexual experiences, including the emotional valence of first intercourse. Ethnically diverse samples of early adolescent girls participated in in-depth interviews and focus groups addressing their views of the positive and negative consequences associated with sexual activity for themselves and their peers. Girls described far more positive consequences than negative. Next, a sample of 180 girls (12-14 years) completed two structured interviews one year apart. Measures included demographic information, sexual and romantic histories, sociosexual cognitions, and anticipated and recall emotions. Girls who transitioned to first intercourse experience were different from those who remained abstinent in terms of the positive valence of their expectations about sex at Time 1. Age and positive anticipated emotions were the best predictors of who transitioned to intercourse. Contrary to many characterizations of first experiences, however, anticipation about their first encounter was characterized by relative ambivalence, whereas their recollections about actual events indicated that these experiences were far more positive than they had expected. The results of this series of studies help to explain how girls interpret the range of conflicting messages about their sexuality in making decisions about sex, and how interventions to delay or prevent transitions to intercourse may be stymied by the overwhelmingly positive aspects of sexual experience that girls perceive.