Young Italians’ sexual debut: the role of family

Abstract

In most developed countries, last decades have seen the postponement of the events marking the transition to adulthood, while the age at sexual debut has been progressively anticipated. At the same time, the entry into adult sexuality has gradually acquired autonomy in the sequence of events that characterize the life of an individual, and young men’s and women’s behaviours have become more similar. Our aim is to verify if the role of family contextual factors associated with sexual debut has changed across the XXI century, leading to a similarity in these relationships between young male and female students. Using data from the Italian Students Sexuality survey run in 2000-2001 and the Sexual and Emotional LiFe of Youth survey conducted in 2017, we applied event history models for the transition to first sexual intercourse. We find that there is only a partial convergence: family background, even when controlling for individual characteristics, still influences differently young men’s and women’s age at sexual debut.