Familial communication and adolescent sexual behavior

This study is a follow-up of Roberts' Family Life and Sexual Learning (A521) and was conducted in collaboration with Roberts. The purpose of the study was to examine parent-child communication patterns and their relationship to adolescent sexual behavior. In 1977 a survey of almost 1,500 parents of 3- to 11-year-old children was conducted by Roberts. In 1983, the current researcher recontacted the sample in order to interview the children, currently adolescents, and to gather new data from the parents. Three hundred twenty-six adolescents participated; two-thirds were from families whose parents had taken part in the first study, and one-third comprised a supplemental sample. One-half of the adolescents were girls; 271 teens were white, the remainder were minorities. Their ages ranged between 11 and 19 years. Two hundred thirty-three mothers and 183 fathers completed questionnaires. Of these parents, 140 mothers and 108 fathers had participated in the original study. The adolescents were administered a personal, structured interview covering the following topics: educational plans, family plans, work plans, friendship, love, family relationships, parental rules, parents' relationship with each other, sexual experience, contraception, pregnancy, facts about reproduction, attitudes about sex, body image, parental communication about sexual matters, other sources of information, masturbation, and attitudes about sex roles. Some of these concepts were tapped by a nontraditional sexual values scale, a sexual comfort scale, a friendship closeness scale, a family closeness scale, and a sexual knowledge scale. The parent questionnaire covered basic demographics, division of household labor, communication with children about sexual matters (covering 19 topics), useful sources of information on sex education, sexual values, sex role attitudes, knowledge of children's sexual behavior, and availability of information about sex in the parents' own childhood home. Computer-accessible and open-ended portions of the interview data from this follow-up are available. The Murray Center has computer-accessible data from the first wave of this study as well.