Religiosity differences in the transition to first intercourse before age 18 among Polish students

Wiktoria Wróblewska

doi:10.1186/s41118-020-00083-6

Abstract

Poland is a Catholic country and is one of a few countries in Europe where the percentage of people declaring themselves as non-believing remains rather low. Thus, most young Poles are brought up in Catholic families and receive religious instruction at school.The purpose of this study is to estimate the effects of religiosity and gender on the risk of first intercourse before age 18 among university students in Poland. We analysed data from two comparative studies of affective life, sexual behaviour, and attitudes conducted among university students in 2001 and 2013. We used survival analysis techniques to test for relative differences in the effects of religiosity on the timing of first sexual intercourse. While the results confirm that religiosity was a significant differentiating factor in the sexual behaviours of students in Poland, they also show that religiosity was a significant predictor of sexual abstinence only if a young person regarded religion as very important. The unadjusted median age at first sex for the participants who attached no or little importance to religion was more than 2 years lower than the median age among those who considered religion very important and attended church services regularly. The findings also indicate that there were significant gender differences, with young males transitioning to sex earlier than young females, albeit only among the 2001 cohort. The multivariate analyses confirm the absence of significant gender differences in FSI before age 18 within religious groups (controlling for other factors) in the cohort of students born after 1990. The results for control variables are consistent with the literature indicating that growing up in a two-parent household has a protective effect, and that teenage lifestyles are significant. Our observation of a distinct polarity of students with respect to religiosity and the timing of sexual debut may be a starting point for further analyses of FSI determinants.

Highlights

The erosion of the traditionally close association between sex and marriage and the growing gap between the age at sexual initiation and the age at marriage are elements of the extensive changes in values related to family life and household formation that have been taking place since the end of the 1960s in Northern and Western European countries, Mediterranean countries, and Canada and the USA (Lesthaeghe, 2010; Surkyn & Lesthaeghe, 2004; Lesthaeghe & Neidert, 2006)
Religiosity and the timing of first sexual intercourse (FSI) among students Almost half of the female students and one-third of the male students in the 2001 study stated that they regularly participated in religious activities, both as teenagers and as university students and that religion was important or very important to them
The focus of this work was on the poorly documented link between religiosity and sexual behaviour among young Poles, and on how this association changed during the period of social transition the Eastern and Central European (ECE) countries experienced after 1990

Summary

Introduction

The erosion of the traditionally close association between sex and marriage and the growing gap between the age at sexual initiation and the age at marriage are elements of the extensive changes in values related to family life and household formation that have been taking place since the end of the 1960s in Northern and Western European countries, Mediterranean countries, and Canada and the USA (Lesthaeghe, 2010; Surkyn & Lesthaeghe, 2004; Lesthaeghe & Neidert, 2006). There is a considerable body of research showing that there is a positive association between religion and more conservative sex-related attitudes and behaviour at different stages in the life course (e.g. Frejka & Westoff, 2008; Vignoli & Salvini, 2014; Thornton & Camburn, 1987; Eggebeen & Dew, 2009; Frątczak & Sikorska, 2009; Burdette, Hill, & Myers, 2015)

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