This is a continuation to develop and expand upon data collected in a retrospective longitudinal study exploring the relationships among a variety of sexual experiences - including sexual socialization, voluntary sexual practices, and sexual abuse - and their effect on women's psychological well-being. Previous research has tended to examine these areas separately from one another and most studies have focused on restricted samples, such as college studies. As a result, there is little available to mental health professionals that identifies factors contributing to the occurrence of sexual abuse and its effects on psychological and sexual functioning, especially as these pertain to ethnic minority women. The purpose of the continuation is to develop a more comprehensive model of these complex relationships that will have utility for women from a variety of cultural backgrounds. The method of sampling involved a multi-stage stratified probability sample using quotas representative of young adult women, ages 18 to 36, in Los Angeles County. Random-digit dialing was used to recruit participants, and in-depth face-to-face interviews were conducted with 126 Afro-American and 122 White women. In order to allow for between-group as well as within group comparisons, women from the two ethnic groups were matched on the basis of age, education, marital status, and the presence of children. The study has provided extensive descriptive information - spanning childhood, adolescence and adulthood - concerning voluntary and abusive sexual experiences. Analyses conducted thus far have identified the following association: environmental and familial characteristics contributing to the risk of sexual abuse, the effects of child sexual abuse on adult sexual and psychological functioning; and the influence of family life and sexual socialization on adolescent sexual activity. Proposed secondary analyses will first involve further data reduction to develop and refine indicators of key constructs. Path analyses and latent-variable structural equation modeling will then be employed to test the relationships between constructs. These statistical methods permit the separation of measurement error from true score variance. Thus, the structural models will be quite powerful and the resulting relationships substantially larger than those obtained from standard methods. The ultimate goal of the continuation is to develop a theoretical model or models than can then be tested on other samples.
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