A model of premarital coitus and contraceptive behavior among female adolescents.

At the most general level, I seek to model female adolescent sexual and contraceptive behavior in terms of the social context in which it occurs. Drawing on emerging theoretical literature pertaining to social exchange theory and changes in the social positions of women (and men) and also on existing substantive literature, I apply these notions to adolescent sexuality and contraceptive usage. The reviews of the literature reveal a number of inconsistencies among those factors (variables) advanced to explain both the prevalence and frequency of premarital coitus and contraceptive employment. Furthermore, as there is a paucity of well-developed theoretical models that might explain these inconsistencies, what is needed is an additional study that seeks to examine the net effects of those variables used in the literature to explain variations in female premarital coitus and contraceptive use. The present formulation is a two-stage causal model that can be used to estimate the impact of these variables on premarital coital behavior (stage 1) and subsequent contraceptive usage (stage 2). These models, and a concomitant set of hypotheses, take into account an array of the more significant sociological and social psychological variables as far as the prediction of the two phenomena in question are concerned. These models may be useful in guiding future research as they graphically display the relationships between these sets of variables within the context of a more general theory of human behavior.