What Do Adolescents Do When They Hook up?

Hooking up is a dominant form of sexual encounter among college students and has replaced dating as the way students form relationships. But what it entails is opaque, even to the students. I identify behaviors engaged in when hooking up and the demographic correlates of having in oral or vaginal sex through a survey of 14,600 college students. Kissing and touching breasts or buttocks are the most common activities; most hookups also include manual genital stimulation. Many hookups involve oral and vaginal sex and multivariate analyses show marked variation by a number of characteristics in having either. Religious service attendance and GPA have a negative relationship with having oral or vaginal sex. Age and a history of hooking up with this partner have a positive relationship. Women are less likely to engage in oral sex, and Hispanics are less likely than whites to engage in either oral or vaginal sex. I also consider condom usage within three contexts: a relationship, a date and a hook-up. I find that there are similar rates of condom usage within a date and a hook-up (about 67 percent of encounters) but the rates drop dramatically within a relationship context (49 percent). Race, age and gender are the strongest predictors of using a condom within a hooking-up context. Older students are less likely to use condoms than younger students; black students are less likely to use condoms than white students and women are less likely to have condom used during their encounter than men.