U.S. College Students’ Sexual Risk Behaviors Before and During the Early COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

The present study describes changes in young adults’ sexual behaviors during the early COVID-19 pandemic. Latent class growth analyses (LCGAs) conducted with four waves of data collected between July 2019 to May 2020 in N = 775 college students (M_age = 18.61, SD = 0.33; 50.3% female, 90.2% White) revealed the presence of high- and low-risk classes in separate models for oral, vaginal, and anal sexual risk taking. As anticipated, vaginal and oral risk taking declined in spring 2020. Membership in high-risk trajectories was attributable to high COVID-19-related financial problems, early sexual debut, low self-control, and being in a romantic relationship. Other COVID-19 factors and demographic control variables were not linked to trajectory membership. Thus, while many young adults’ sexual risk taking changed during the early pandemic, their perceptions of and experiences with COVID-19 were not predictive of sexual risk trajectory membership.

Acknowledgments

We thank John Geldhof and Abhik Roy for their assistance with data analyses.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interests were reported by the authors.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2023.2246160

Notes

¹ As the Wave 3 assessment was ongoing when the university suspended all on-campus operations as of the end of the day on March 13, 2020 (i.e., students’ last day of in-person classes on campus), we compared those who completed the survey before versus after the campus closed. These analyses revealed no significant mean differences in the vaginal, oral, or anal risk composites.

Additional information

Funding

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health [U54GM104942]. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.