Virgin College Students' Reasons for and Reactions to Their Abstinence From Sex: Results From a 23-Year Study at a Midwestern U.S. University

Abstract

Sexual activity is normative in college. Thus, college students who are virgins are a minority; they are also an understudied group. This study extended a prior investigation (Sprecher & Regan, 1996) that focused on U.S. college virgins' reported reasons for and reactions to virginity. Data were collected from the same university over an additional 18 years and from more than 700 additional virgin students. We found differences between male and female virgins that showed that men are more reluctant virgins. For example, the only reason for being a virgin that male virgins endorsed to a greater degree than did female virgins was “my partner was not willing.” Men also had more negative affective reactions to being a virgin than did women. We also found some variation in reasons for and reactions to virginity based on sociodemographic variables such as religiosity and ethnicity. A temporal analysis revealed that reasons for being a virgin that referred to a fear (e.g., fear of AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections) became less important over the 23-year period. We discuss our findings in the frameworks of evolutionary and social exchange theories.

Notes

¹For a table with the list of items we used in this study as well as loadings on their respective components, contact the first author.

²Because our index of personal beliefs included the item “It is against my religious beliefs,” we performed an additional analysis with this item removed from the index. This test yielded findings similar to our initial analysis: sex (β = −0.23) and religiosity (β = 0.46) remained relatively sizable predictors of personal beliefs (both ps < .001). Ethnicity, however, became a significant predictor of personal beliefs in this model (β = 0.10, p < .001), with non-White participants (M = 2.47, SE = 0.08) endorsing personal beliefs as somewhat more important a reason for virginity than White and Asian participants (M = 2.18, SE = 0.02, d = 0.36 [95% CI_d = 0.16, 0.55]).

³An ancillary analysis revealed that Blacks/Hispanics (M = 0.25, SD = 0.90) versus Whites/Asians (M = −0.02, SD = 0.94) reported marginally more religiosity, t = −3.03, p = .003, d = 0.31. Given the difference in personal beliefs as a reason behind virginity between these ethnic groups, we explored whether religiosity mediated the between-race difference in the former variable. For this analysis, we used the modified component of personal beliefs in which we omitted the item “It is against my religious beliefs” (see note 2). A Monte Carlo simulation of the indirect effect (Preacher & Selig, 2012; see Selig & Preacher, 2008 for the online tool used to perform this analysis) with 50,000 repetitions revealed that religiosity was indeed a partial mediator of the between-race difference in personal beliefs (95% CI of the indirect effect: 0.11, 0.22; as zero was not within the confidence interval, the indirect effect is statistically significant at p < .05). Thus, Blacks and Hispanics compared to Whites and Asians reported personal beliefs as a more important reason for virginity due to their higher religious beliefs.