The recent release of the Surgeon General's Call to Action to Promote Sexual Health and Responsible Sexual Behavior evidences the continued interest and concern regarding sexual behavior and its outcomes, particularly among adolescents. Research and great deal of resources on the prevention of negative sexual outcomes such as unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STI), with only mixed results. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) has been used to study a wide range of health behaviors, including safer sex behaviors such as condom use. Comprised of various sociocognitive elements (attitudes, norms, and perceived behavioral control), the TPB postulates that these elements predict intentions to perform a behavior, and that these intentions, in turn, predict the actual behavior. Despite the proliferation of the TPB in studies of sexual behavior, there remain several compelling issues worthy of study.
This research aims to explore four different issues relating to the TPB and adolescent sexual behavior: 1) The predictive value of past behavior has received some attention in the literature on the TPB, but the issue of whether or not past behavior should be included in the model remains unresolved; 2) In addition, a growing body of research on attitudes toward sexuality suggests that having a """"""""sex-positive"""""""" attitude, one that endorses sexuality and sexual behaviors as positive aspects of one's life and personality, increases one's ability to advocate for themselves in the sexual arena, such as for the need for safer sex. This suggests a new course for preventive interventions for teens, and calls for further empirical consideration; 3) Third, although the TPB has many strengths, it fails to consider the influence of macrocontextual factors on behavior. Gender differences in social power, for example, may hinder the ability of an adolescent girl to use safer sex if her male partner is unwilling, regardless of her personal perceptions of behavioral control ; 4) Last, as advocated in the Surgeon General's report, it is necessary to consider physical, sexual, and mental health as interrelated rather than discrete domains, and to fully explore the connections among them. In order to accomplish these objectives, the TPB will be applied to data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Add Health's size, sample diversity, breadth of focus, and longitudinal design each enable researchers to tackle a wide range of issues, including those mentioned above. This proposed work strives to contribute to existing knowledge by exploring emerging areas of interest in the field of adolescent sexuality while still remaining grounded in a well-established theory of health behavior prediction.
