Bare market: campus sex ratios, romantic relationships, and sexual behavior.

Using a nationally representative sample of college women, we evaluate the effect of campus sex ratios on women's relationship attitudes and behaviors. Our results suggest that women on campuses where they comprise a higher proportion of the student body give more negative appraisals of campus men and relationships, go on fewer traditional dates, are less likely to have had a college boyfriend, and are more likely to be sexually active. These effects appear to stem both from decreased dyadic power among women on campuses where they are more numerous and from their increased difficulty locating a partner on such campuses.

The role of religion in shaping sexual frequency and satisfaction: evidence from married and unmarried older adults.

This study assesses the role of religion in influencing sexual frequency and satisfaction among older married adults and sexual activity among older unmarried adults. The study proposes and tests several hypotheses about the relationship between religion and sex among these two groups of older Americans, using nationally representative data from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project. Results suggest that among married older adults, religion is largely unrelated with sexual frequency and satisfaction, although religious integration in daily life shares a weak, but positive, association with pleasure from sex.

When faith divides family: religious discord and adolescent reports of parent-child relations.

What happens to family relations when an adolescent and her parent do not share the same religious convictions or practices? Whereas previous work on religion and intergenerational relations looks at relationships between parents and their adult children, we shift the focus to younger families, assessing how parent-child religious discord affects adolescents' evaluation of their relationship with their parents. Exploring data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we find several interesting patterns of association between religious discord and parent-child relations. Overall, religious discord predicts lower quality intergenerational relations.

Going most of the way: "technical virginity" among American adolescents.

Reports from academic and media sources assert that many young people substitute non-vaginal sexual activities for vaginal intercourse in order to maintain what could be called "technical virginity." Explanations for technical virginity, however, are based on weak empirical evidence and considerable speculation. Using a sample of 15-19-year-olds from Cycle 6 of the National Survey of Family Growth, we examine technical virginity and its motivations.

Coital debut: the role of religiosity and sex attitudes in the Add Health Survey.

Recent reviews suggest that religiosity is associated with the delay of adolescent coital debut (Rostosky, Wilcox, Wright, Randall, in press; Wilcox, Rostosky, Randall, Wright, 2001). Few studies, however, have examined this association using longitudinal data to test theoretically driven models. We analyzed data from 3,691 adolescents (ages 15-21), testing the hypothesis that adolescent religiosity and sex attitudes (at Wave 1) predict later coital debut (at Wave 2) and that these predictive relationships vary by gender.