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Living Your Faith: Associations Between Family and Personal Religious Practices and Emerging Adults’ Sexual Behavior

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Abstract

As emerging adults recenter (Tanner and Arnett in Debating emerging adulthood: Stage or process? Oxford University Press, New York, pp 13–30, 2011) their relationships with their family, they may retain some values and behaviors, while they disregard others temporarily or even for good. In the current study, we investigated whether emerging adults’ personal and family religious practices contribute to sexual intercourse within and outside a committed relationship cross-sectionally and over 1 year. College students completed questionnaires (N T1 = 779; N T2 = 538). Using hierarchical logistic regressions on sexual intercourse within and outside a committed relationship at Time 1, family and personal religious practices predicted sexual intercourse within and outside a committed relationship; the family × personal religious practices interaction was also significant. Hierarchical logistic regressions showed that for Time 1 virgins (N = 286), only sexual permissive attitudes predicted sexual intercourse within and outside a committed relationship at Time 2. Thus, the current study’s findings supported this important developmental shifting that promotes emerging adults’ individuation.

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Notes

  1. Since there were very low to empty cell sizes in the two dependent variables as a function of the “other religion” category, this group was omitted from the sample and analyses recalculate dummy codes for religion.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank all Project READY data collection sites as well as Loyola University Maryland for a senior faculty sabbatical grant to the first author and the Family Studies Center at Brigham Young University for grant support of the larger project. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2011 National Council for Family Relations in Orlando, FL.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Beatty 212, Department of Psychology, Loyola University Maryland, 4501 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD, 21210, USA

    Carolyn McNamara Barry

  2. School of Family Life, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA

    Brian J. Willoughby & Kirsten Clayton

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  1. Carolyn McNamara Barry
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  2. Brian J. Willoughby
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  3. Kirsten Clayton
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Correspondence to Carolyn McNamara Barry.

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Barry, C.M., Willoughby, B.J. & Clayton, K. Living Your Faith: Associations Between Family and Personal Religious Practices and Emerging Adults’ Sexual Behavior. J Adult Dev 22, 159–172 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-015-9209-2

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