Acculturation, Gender Disparity, and the Sexual Behavior of Asian American Youth

Abstract

Asian American youth are less likely to be sexually active than adolescents from other ethnic groups; however, with acculturation, they may adopt the more liberal sexual norms of American society. Moreover, owing to differing parental expectations for sons and daughters about sexuality, gender disparity might exist in the adoption of American sexual norms. This article used the proportional hazards model and the generalized estimating equations Poisson model to examine how acculturation influences the initiation of sexual intercourse and the number of sexual partners. The results show that acculturation leads to more liberal sexual mores among Asian American youth. However, despite what might be expected from the sexual double standard, the models show that more acculturated females, as indicated by their use of English at home, had an earlier onset of sexual intercourse and a higher number of sexual partners. This is the opposite of what would be predicted by the sexual double standard theory. This might be due to the fact that Asian females tend to be more socially accepted by the host society than Asian males. Information on partners shows that Asian American females have more diversified racial backgrounds than their male counterparts. They are also more likely to have older sexual partners.

Acknowledgments

This research used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and was funded by Grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health Web site: http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth. No direct support was received from Grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis.

Notes

¹I used the more specific categories for parental education, but it did not have an impact on the age of first-time sexual intercourse. To make the model more parsimonious, I grouped them into a binary variable of high school graduate or not.

Note. N = 1060. Asterisks mean that the variables in the model of number of sexual partners were the same as in the model of age at first sexual intercourse. Model 1 used the “church attendence” measured at Wave 1, and Model 2 used “church attendence” measured at Wave 3.

***p < .001 **p < .01 *p < .05 †p < .10.

Note. Age gap is included in parantheses.