More on Sex...

I was just searching through another lot of articles and I came across another article relating to sex and popularity. This journal article is a little bit more in depth. I found it quite interesting. The article talks about a number of things however I have summarised some key concepts here.

The idea of the article was to explore the benefits of sexual intercourse and oral sex on adolscents. Most benefits were found among peer relations and perceptions through the use of sociometric assessment. The results found that adolescents' reports of oral sex and intercourse were significantly associated with peer perceived popularity but not likability among peers. According to Prinstein, Meade & Cohen (2003) these results suggests that adolescents may either enjoy higher status or they feel pressure to report higher sexual activity.


Prinstein, Meade & Cohen (2003) conclude that
"Adolescents may believe that sexual activity best matches a prototype of popular, high-status adolescents. Reputation-based measures of peer status identify those individuals who best match this prototype of popularity; indeed, only this measure of status was associated with sexual behavior. The desire to engage in, or simply report, sexual activity may reflect adolescents' motivation to imitate that prototype (e.g., Gibbons & Gerrard, 1995)."

In contrast they found that the more sexual partners, the more likely popular status and peer acceptance declined. I thought this research was useful, as it clearly identifies the differences between being liked and being popular within their research. I hope you all found it interesting, a link to the article can be found below.

Prinstein, M. J., Meade, C.S., & Cohen, G. L. (2003) Adolescent Oral Sex, Peer Popularity, and Perceptions of Best Friends' Sexual. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 28, (4), 243-249.