Religiousness and Sexual Values Predict Sexual Incongruence: Results from a U.S. Nationally Representative Study

Abstract

The present work aimed to clarify commonly endorsed sexual values in the general U.S. population as well as the association between sexual values and incongruence. Study 1 recruited adults (N = 923; 51.8% women; M_age = 35.5, SD = 10.8) to answer a free response question about sexual values via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, while Study 2 posed the same question to a weighted, nationally representative U.S. sample (N = 2,519; 51.4% women; M_age = 48.2, SD = 17.8). Data collection was completed in 2017 and 2019, respectively. Results from these cross-sectional studies demonstrated that, although religiousness predicted sexual incongruence, conservative sexual values predicted variance in sexual incongruence, over and above the effects of religiousness.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.

Notes

1 Calculated correlations between two dichotomous variables are equivalent to Phi, and calculated correlations between a dichotomous variable (e.g., value endorsement) and a continuous variable (e.g., sexual incongruence) are equivalent to the point-biserial correlation. However, in both cases, each is an extension of the Pearson correlation more broadly. As such, throughout this document, we will refer to such associations as Pearson correlations.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Bowling Green State University via a Building Strengths Grant awarded to J.B. Grubbs and by the Charles Koch Foundation.