Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #116960

John S. Santelli, MD¹, Lawrence B. Finer, PhD², Susheela Singh², and Laura Duberstein Lindberg, PhD². (1) Department of Population and Family Health, Columbia University, 60 Haven Ave. #B2, New York, NY 10032, (2) The Alan Guttmacher Institute, 120 Wall Street, New York, NY 10005, 212-248-1111, lfiner@guttmacher.org

The U.S. federal government's Healthy People 2010 goals include increasing the proportion of adolescents who abstain from sexual intercourse, and the 2006 budget proposed by the current administration substantially increases funding for abstinence-only education, which typically advocates delaying sexual initiation until marriage. Yet past data have indicated that the large majority of adolescents become sexually active during the teenage years. The goals of this analysis are to assess whether these behaviors have changed and whether these goals are attainable, and to examine the context of adolescent sexual behavior in more detail. Using newly available data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth, we will examine changes in adolescent sexual behavior since the last NSFG in 1995. Behaviors examined will include age at sexual initiation, and use of contraception at first sex; event history techniques will be used to look at the age patterns in initations of these behaviors, and differences by gender, ethnicity and other demographic variables will be examined. We will also look at adolescents' number of sexual partners and patterns of partner acquisition, as well as partner characteristics. In addition, a focus of the analysis will be the extent to which age at sexual initiation influences later partner acquisition and contraceptive use. Finally, comparisons of data collected in 1995 and 2002 surveys from the same cohort of individuals (e.g., those born in 1975) will be used to address questions of reporting bias: Has the propensity of individuals to report early sexual behavior changed?

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