Young adults today aren't having more sex on campus, but they are having sex with less commitment from partners.

Young adults today aren't having more sex on campus than peers did 25 years ago, a new study says. But they are having sex with less commitment from partners.

Sex on college campuses isn't any more prevalent than it was 25 years ago, despite what's often termed a "hookup culture" that suggests otherwise, says research presented today comparing current-day college students with those of the past.

"Sexual behavior among contemporary college students has not changed greatly over the past 2½ decades," says the study, from the University of Portland in Oregon, presented at the American Sociological Association's meeting in New York City.

"We're questioning some of the popular interpretations of the hookup culture that college is a sexual playground," says lead author Martin Monto. "We wanted to question the assumption that college has become a place with lots of no-strings-attached sex. The evidence suggests it hasn't."

The researchers analyzed nationally representative data from the General Social Survey of 1,829 high school graduates ages 18-25 who had completed at least one year of college. They compared responses from 1988-1996 were compared with those from 2002-2010 – when casual sex, "friends with benefits" and no-strings relationships became part of the lexicon. Most respondents were ages 21-25.

Rather than a sexual explosion, the study says, young adults "do not report more total sexual partners or more partners during the past year than respondents from the previous era. In fact, respondents from the hookup era report having sex slightly less frequently." The term "hookup" can refer to a wide range of behaviors and is often vague, ranging from kissing to oral sex to sexual intercourse.

"The term 'hooking up' is very provocative and very ambiguous," Monto says. "So when researchers ask students about hooking up, students often could be referring to anything from sexual intercourse to kissing. But when the term 'hooking up' is used in the popular media, it is often interpreted as sex. That has led to an assumption that college students' sexual behavior has changed dramatically."

But the study does suggest a shift to the casual. Rather than sex with a spouse or partner, recent respondents were more likely to report having sex with a casual date/pickup (44% vs. 35% in the past) or a friend (69% vs. 56%). They were less likely to report having a spouse or regular sexual partner (77% vs. 85%).

"College students in this era don't feel the need to maintain the pretense that a sexual partner is a potential marriage partner," says Monto, a sociologist.

These new findings echo research from Duke University collected in 2007 that found more virgins in the college population — another suggestion that hookups aren't as prevalent as many believe. The responses from 1,500 freshmen and seniors found about 53% of women and 40% of men said they were virgins. The study was presented two years ago at the sociological association's meeting.

A study published in the journal Health Communication in 2011 also suggests that there's more talk than practice. Researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln found that 84% of students said they had talked with college friends in the previous four months about hookups. But when asked how many hookups they had during the school year, students reported far fewer than the number they assumed for a "typical student." The study of approximately 300 students found that 37% reported two or more hookups that year, but 90% assumed that a "typical student" had two or more. That study found 63% of men and 45% of women had participated in a hookup during the school year.

In this new study, the researchers said that among young adults in the more recent group, 59% reported having sex weekly or more in the past year, compared with 65% in the 1980s and '90s. Both groups reported similar patterns in the number of sexual partners in the past year: about 32% reported having more than one partner. Slightly more than half (52%) of the earlier group reported having more than two sexual partners after turning 18, compared with 51% of the recent group.

"Our results provide no evidence that there has been a sea change in the sexual behavior of college students or that there has been a significant liberalization of attitudes towards sex," says researcher Martin Monto, who presented the study.

"We find no evidence of substantial changes in sexual behavior that would support the proposition that there is a new or pervasive 'hookup culture' among contemporary college students," the study says.





Souce: USA Today