Heterosexual Casual Sex and STI Diagnosis: A Latent Class Analysis

ABSTRACT

Casual sex is common during the emerging adult life course stage, but little research has taken a person-centered approach to investigate if casual sexual behavior influences sexually transmitted infection (STI) rates. Using a nationally representative sample and latent class analysis, results showed three distinctive latent classes. Abstainers were the least likely to have an STI, followed by the casual sex experienced, and then the casual sex risk-takers. Once other covariates were included in the model, there was no significant difference between the abstainers and casual sex experienced classes. These results highlight the need for future research to include diverse samples of emerging adults.

KEYWORDS:

• Casual sex
• young adults
• sexually transmitted diseases
• life course

Acknowledgments

Special acknowledgment is due to 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 website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/ addhealth). The author would like to thank Wendi Johnson, Sarah Erskine, and Lori Burrington for their helpful comments on this manuscript.

Notes

1. To account for the complex survey weights, Stata turns the χ² value into an F statistic. The p-value reported by Stata can be interpreted the same way as the p-value for the χ². Please see the Stata Survey data reference manual for more information http://www.stata.com/manuals14/svy.pdf.

2. Stata does not provide bivariate crosstab tables with analyses that include multiple imputation. Among the Wave 4 respondents who have valid responses (N = 11,983), 85% did not claim to have an STI at either wave, 6% had an STI at Wave 3 but not Wave 4, 7% had an STI at Wave 4 but not Wave 3, and 2% had an STI at both waves.

3. As stated in the previous note, Stata does not provide bivariate crosstab tables with analyses that include multiple imputation. The results of the bivariate chi-square test with missing data on the two dependent variables were similar to the bivariate logistic regression models presented in Tables 4 and 5. For the dependent variable of Wave 3 STI, the results were in the expected direction. The casual sex abstainers (6%) were the least likely to have an STI diagnosis during the past 12 months, followed by the casual sex experienced group (10%), and the casual sex risk-takers group (13%) was most likely to have an STI. At the bivariate level, there were similar results for STI diagnosis at Wave 4 as in the Wave 3 analysis. Eight percent of the abstainers claim to have an STI at Wave 4 compared to 11% of the casual sex experienced, and 13% of the casual sex risk-takers.

Additional information

Funding

This research uses data from 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 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. No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis.