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Article Excerpt
Research on adolescent sexual behavior predominantly has focused on sexual risk taking behaviors in efforts to reduce unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs; e.g., Capaldi, Stoolmiller, Clark, & Owen, 2002; Raffaelli & Crockett, 2003). Whereas the continuing high incidence rates of STDs in the adolescent population are a serious public health issue, developmental psychologists and feminist theorists (among others) have sought to enlarge the research agenda from the more narrow focus on risk reduction to a broader goal of promoting adolescent sexual health (Russell, 2005; Welsh, Rostosky, & Kawaguchi, 2000). Drawing on ecological developmental theories, researchers have proposed multidimensional models of healthy sexuality that include, at the level of the individual, the development of a positive sexual self-view or sexual self-concept (Tolman, Striepe, & Harmon, 2003). To date, however, only a handful of empirical studies (reviewed below) have examined adolescent sexual self-concept as a potentially important factor in promoting adolescent sexual health.
Sexual self-concept is considered a multidimensional construct that refers to an individual's positive and negative perceptions and feelings about him- or herself as a sexual being. As with other dimensions of self-concept, the development and consolidation of one's sexual self-concept is considered an important developmental task of adolescence (Chilman, 1983; Gagnon & Simon, 1973; Longmore, 1998). Despite its developmental significance, however, only a handful of published studies have focused on assessing adolescents' sexual self-concepts and determining associations between adolescents' sexual self-concepts and sexual behaviors and experiences (Breakwell & Millward, 1997; Impett & Tolman, 2006; O'Sullivan, Meyer-Bahlburg, & McKeague, 2006; Winter, 1988).
Breakwell and Millward (1997) surveyed a sample of 474 adolescents who were 16-19 years old and found that sexual assertiveness or sexual agency (the sole dimension of female adolescent sexual self-concept that emerged in factor analyses) was associated with female adolescents' reports of higher numbers of partners and more frequent condom use. In the male adolescents, however, sexual self-concept was unrelated to these sexual risk-taking behaviors. Impett and Tolman (2006), using a modified unidimensional measure of sexual self-concept (Winter, 1988) with a sample of 116 late adolescent girls, found that sexual self-concept was associated with more sexual experience (including coital frequency) and sexual satisfaction. Sexual self-concept was not, however, associated with greater numbers of partners or earlier coital debut.
Finally, O'Sullivan et al. (2006) developed and validated a sexual self-concept inventory specifically for ethnically diverse early adolescent girls. In this study, sexual self-concept was composed of three factors, sexual arousability, sexual agency, and negative sexual affect, each of which was associated with reports of romantic and sexual experiences. Higher scores on the first factor were significantly associated with girls' reports of having a boyfriend, having been in love, kissing, fondling, and coitus; higher scores on the sexual agency factor were associated with reports of kissing and fondling experiences. Girls who reported higher levels of negative sexual affect (anxiety, self-monitoring) were significantly less likely to report these sexual experiences.
In sum, relatively little empirical work has been directed toward creating valid multidimentional measures of sexual self-concept in adolescence. Existing measures are either unidimensional (Breakwell & Millward, 1997; Winter, 1988) or focus solely on girls' sexual self-concept (O'Sullivan et al., 2006). Despite some limitations, the few studies that have used these measures have consistently found that sexual self-concept is significantly associated with sexual experiences and sexual behaviors. Therefore, the present study examined a multidimensional measure of sexual self-concept previously validated on university samples of males and females to determine its usefulness in assessing sexual self-concept and its associations with sexual self-efficacy among high school aged adolescent males and females.
Sexual Self-Concept and Self-Efficacy
According to social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986), self-efficacy, or an individual's beliefs about his/her ability to perform a particular behavior in a given situation, mediates the relation between an individual's knowledge and skills related to performing a behavior and his or her actual performance of the behavior. For example, in the area of sexual risk taking, contraceptive self-efficacy has been found to be linked to actual contraceptive use level at last sexual intercourse (Sieving, Bearinger, Resnick, Pettingell, & Skay, 2007). Likewise, condom use self-efficacy has been linked to actual condom use (Kalichman et al., 2002), and resistive efficacy has been linked to having fewer sexual partners (Mitchell, Kaufman, & Beals, 2005).
We were able to locate only three published studies that assessed both sexual self-concept and sexual self-efficacy. The central focus of these studies was predicting sexual risk-taking behavior; thus, the relation between sexual self-concept and sexual self-efficacy was not hypothesized. The findings from these studies, however, form an important foundation for our research hypotheses, so we describe each of them below.
Salazar et al. (2004) used a sample of 335 African American, sexually active, high-risk, adolescent females ages 14-18 (37% had reported at least one pregnancy) to test a model in which self-concept and partner communication predicted the frequency of refusing unprotected sex in the previous 6 months. The authors found that partner communication variables (a latent variable that included a measure of condom self-efficacy) mediated the relation between self-concept (a latent variable that included global self-esteem) and sex refusal. While these results suggest the importance of self-concept and self-efficacy to understanding African American females' sex refusal behavior, the study neither measured nor modeled the specific contributions of specific measures of sexual self-concept and sexual self-efficacy.
An earlier study by Rosenthal, Moore, and Flynn (1991) collected data from a large Australian sample of sexually active university freshman using specific measures of sexual self-concept and sexual self-efficacy. Findings indicated that one specific sexual self-efficacy factor (i.e., resistive efficacy or the confidence to say no to sex) was associated with lower sexual risk taking (defined as condom use) with both casual and regular sex partners. With regular partners, however, higher assertive self-efficacy and more positive sexual self-esteem were associated with higher sexual risk-taking scores. The pattern of these results was similar for both males and females, although the researchers noted significant mean level sex differences in both sexual self-esteem scores (males' scores were higher than females) and scores on the resistive efficacy factor (females' scores were higher than males).
Seal, Minichiello, and Omodei (1997) built on the Rosenthal et al.'s (1991) findings using another Australian university sample of young women. In this study, sexual self-efficacy was composed of one global, rather than three specific, factors, and, contrary to expectations, was positively associated with increased sexual risk with casual partners (but not with regular partners). Positive sexual self-esteem was not associated with sexual risk taking in either type of sexual relationship; however, positive views of the sexual relationship were associated with decreased sexual risk taking with casual sex partners and increased sexual risk taking with regular sexual partners.
In sum, only a few studies have examined sexual self-concept and sexual self-efficacy in adolescence, and findings...
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