How do romantic breakups affect depression among American college students? The role of sexual conservativeness

Abstract

Objective

The role of sexual attitudes has been largely ignored in explaining different emotional reactions to breakups among young adults. The authors examined the role of conservative sexual attitudes as a moderator of the relationship between breakups and depressive symptoms. Participants: Participants were 428 undergraduate students at a mid-western university. Data collection was completed in 2013. Methods: Participants completed the questionnaires in class or at home in this cross-sectional survey. OLS regression and Structural equation modeling were used in data analysis. Results: Increased level of sexual conservativeness significantly exacerbated depression after the breakup for those college students who reported sexual behavior with their ex-partner. Conclusions: Although conservative sexual attitudes may show positive effects in promoting healthy sexual behavior, it was found here to be detrimentally related to depression after breakups for college students. This information may help university counselors gain a deeper understanding of post-breakup depression of college students.

Keywords:

• College students
• conservative sexual attitudes
• depression
• romantic breakups

Conflict of interest disclosure

The authors have no conflicts of interest to report. The authors confirm that the research presented in this article met the ethical guidelines, including adherence to the legal requirements, of the United States and received approval from the Kent State University.

Notes

1 The mid-western university has over 37,000 students enrolled in a multiple campus system. The student population is 63% female students and 37% male students. The university has 14.5% undergraduate minority students: 7.5% African American; 3.5% Hispanic/Latino; 3.3% Multiracial and 0.14% Native American or Alaskan Native. Average GPA is about 3.38 to 3.39.

2 This category included two sub-groups, 1) those currently first-time involved (N = 63); 2) those currently involved with last breakup over 12 months (N = 112). We combined them together as the reference category described above because there is no significant difference in their depression level, the lowest level among the four categories.

3 Pan et al. asked some questions about premarital sex, cohabitation, pregnancy before marriage, and women’s obedience.⁴⁴ Given our definition of sexual conservativeness and our respondents from college students, we only selected items related to premarital sex, cohabitation and global measure of conservativeness, excluding questions related to premarital pregnancy. At last, we decided on the final item wording based on our on-line interviews for four American college students.

4 We also considered both of them as latent variables in our complementary analysis and the results do not change.

5 The conventional SEM model fit statistics with latent variable interactions in Mplus haven’t been invented yet mainly because what the “unrestricted model” should be is not clear in this case. There has been work at the research frontier on developing such fit statistics, but it is not ready for use yet. (Asparouhov & Muthén, 2019)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Fund of Ministry of Education in China (MOE) [Grant Number 19YJC840021] and by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in China [Grant Number 413000044].