Sexual behavior underlies many important health issues such as non-marital fertility among teens and sexually transmitted disease. Social norms structure both sexual behavior itself and responses to related outcomes such as unwanted pregnancies, infertility or sexual dysfunction, but too little is known about how sexual behavior is socially organized among adults. The purpose of this research project is to advance the social scientific understanding of adult sexual behavior in the united States through the analysis of four related data sets. The first, a survey data set based on a 3,432 person 1992 U.S. national sample is titled the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS), and includes a wide range of information pertinent to both descriptive and analytic issues about adult sexual behavior and attitudes. A second set of data derives from an 11 question self-administered module included as part of the NHSLS and in six rounds of athe national General Social Survey (GSS) for a total of 12,000 cases over six data sets. A third, is called the Chicago Health and Social Life Survey (CHSLS), and contains important elaborations and extensions to the NHSLS. The CHSLS has a survey component of 2,000 cases divided between a representative cross-section of the Chicago metropolitan area (N925) and a set of four over samples in ethnically and socially distinctive urban neighborhoods (N1100). The fourth data set, also new, is made up of ethnographic field notes and key informant interview focused on institutions that deal with health and sexuality in these same four neighborhoods.
The aim i s to understand sexual behavior itself, its causes and its consequences. The broad range of our interests include; (a) the socially orchestrated number and selection of sex partners and their social relationships to the respondent (b) the practices and preferences that constitute sexual conduct and its evaluation by individuals and institutions, and the consequences of sexual behavior for marriage and living arrangements, fertility, disease, sexual dysfunction and sexual pleasure and emotional gratification. The investigators intent is to produce a set of interrelated articles collected in a book addressing five broad questions: 1. How do neighborhood, institutional and community characteristics influence the sexual behavior of residents? 2. How do social networks and their embedded character influence sexual partner choice and stability, and sexual attitudes? 3. How does sexual exchange in dyads work, and how is it affected by the social networks in which these dyads are embedded? 4. How do formative sexual experience affect non-marital childbearing, high risk sexual behavior, and adult sexual well-being? 4. How are sexual behavior and health related?
| Youm, Yoosik; Laumann, Edward O (2002) Social network effects on the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases. Sex Transm Dis 29:689-97 |
| Laumann, E O; Paik, A; Rosen, R C (1999) Sexual dysfunction in the United States: prevalence and predictors. JAMA 281:537-44 |
| Laumann, E O; Youm, Y (1999) Racial/ethnic group differences in the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases in the United States: a network explanation. Sex Transm Dis 26:250-61 |
| Feinleib, J A; Michael, R T (1998) Reported changes in sexual behavior in response to AIDS in the United States. Prev Med 27:400-11 |
| Laumann, E O; Masi, C M; Zuckerman, E W (1997) Circumcision in the United States. Prevalence, prophylactic effects, and sexual practice. JAMA 277:1052-7 |
