Place and power: How campus culture impacts the perceptions about sexual concurrency among African American male collegians

This qualitative study was exploratory in nature and sought to investigate the connections between campus culture and sexual concurrency among male college students. Sexual concurrency is the act of having multiple sexual partnerships within overlapping time periods (Adimora, Schoenbac & Doherty, 2006). Sexually concurrent partnerships have been identified as risk factors for the transmission of HIV and STIs (Adimora et al., 2006; Lenior, et al., 2006). Women currently outnumber men in college, this coupled with the nature of college relationships suggest that more causal partnerships are permitted. Using a phenomenological approach, 30 semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with African American men ages 18-25 that were currently enrolled full-time at a Historically Black College. Preliminary results suggest that campus culture plays an important role in the development of masculine identity in that students have a different understanding of their role within the broader institution as they matriculate through the institution. Yet in terms of sexual concurrency, the intra-group differences vary vastly, from those who are celibate to those who have multiple sexual relationships across different institutions. The young men discuss their rationales for their stance on sexuality mentioning familial upbringing, religious affiliation, the perceived lack of privacy, the sheer number of women available, or competition between men on campus. These findings suggest that African American men are complex and diverse; thus, future studies should be conducted exclusively with African American collegiate men to better account for the within group diversity for use in future interventions.