Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Correspondence should be addressed to George M. Specifically, many previous studies presuppose that the associations between adolescent religiosity and sexual behaviors are linear.
However, a number of studies have also identified important nonlinearities of religious influence during adolescence, with highly religious individuals being distinct from their peers. Incorporating this knowledge into a theoretically-motivated modeling approach, this article provides a comparative analysis of functional forms describing the relationships between religiosity and adolescent sexual behaviors.
Using data from two waves of the National Study of Youth and Religion, a linear functional form is compared with nonlinear alternatives that link multiple religion measures to outcomes of sexual activity. Results show that the majority of these relationships are best defined by nonlinear functional forms, suggesting that the influence of religiosity increases as individuals become more religious.
For example, religious youth are more likely to believe that sex should be reserved for marriage, to become sexually active at later ages, to pledge abstinence until marriage, and to have fewer sexual partners for reviews, see Burdette, Hill, and Myers ; Regnerus ; Rostosky et al.
Despite these generally consistent findings, most past studies have modeled these relationships in ways that presuppose a linear relationship between religiosity and sex-related dependent variables Cochran et al. There are theoretical reasons to believe and empirical data to suggest, however, that these relationships may actually be non-linear in functional form. Specifically, the inverse relationships between religion and sex in the aggregate may be predominately driven by a highly religious subset of individuals with especially distinctive behavior compared to their peers.
