Casual Contraception in Casual Sex

This page links to the online supplement and the source code for my article in Social Forces, “Casual Contraception in Casual Sex.” This article analyzes data from the Online College Social Life Survey.

Abstract

This article describes life cycle change in the sexual behavior of undergraduates in “hookups” (which are outside of traditional dates or relationships) during years 1-4 of college, explains a decline in the use of condoms, and shows how changes in the odds of coitus and condom use depend on family background, school gender imbalance, and whether the partners attend the same college. Coitus becomes increasingly likely as students progress through college. Condom use rates, in contrast, decline precipitously between freshman and sophomore years, before stabilizing. This rapid normalization of unprotected sex in hookups arises as students adapt to a high-education culture. Condom use rates in freshman year are lowest among students who have the most highly-educated mothers. After freshman year, students with lower-educated mothers converge to the same lower rate. This decline is pronounced when the partners attend the same college. Implications for health and social policy are discussed.

Manuscript

http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/93/2/483

Online Supplement

See this index of sections and models for the results of the analysis.

The manuscript presents information from Sections 1-4. The links under “Sections” open web pages which contain figures and tables. The links under “Models” open web pages which contain detailed summaries of each individual model; you can also access these by clicking on the column titles [the deepest header cells] of the tables.

Source Code

To reproduce the analysis from scratch, download and execute this program in Stata:

	cd /path/to/cccs/
	run cccs
	paper

The archive contains the fitted models. The program will detect these, and it will not re-estimate them. To re-estimate the models, either delete the contents of the folder /path/to/cccs/results_for_cccs/ or execute paper, redo instead of paper. (This could take a day or two.)