Condoms and sugar daddies: Sexual bargaining about condom use among low SES women

While some policymakers assume that safe sex merely requires information or personal confidence, behavioral models suggest that social context may determine females' bargaining power to insist on safe sex. This study uses data from a 3 wave, 12 month study of 715 low-SES African-American adolescent women. Six propensity-weighted logistic regressions predicted never using condoms in the past 14 and 60 days at waves 2 and 3. 24.0% of respondents reported receiving most of their spending money from their boyfriend, which is not predicted by public assistance program participation, neighborhood context, or family background, but is predicted by educational achievement and expectations, abuse history, sexual risk-taking, and sexually transmitted disease status. After weighting by estimated propensity scores, no differences remain between women who receive spending money and those who do not in the 39 evaluated covariates. Women who receive spending money were twice as likely to never use condoms as women who do not, adjusting for earlier condom use, relationship length, use of oral contraceptives, partner concurrency, and intervention status, in all six regressions (p-values from 0.002 to 0.05). Women who discontinue receiving spending money from boyfriends are 2.3 (p=0.04) and 2.9 (p=0.008) times as likely to start using condoms as women who continue. These findings may have policy implications for adolescents' jobs programs or programs that pay women not to become pregnant, which may promote self-reliance and increase safe sex among disadvantaged adolescent women.