As we have discussed, the majority of research on adolescent girls’ sexuality has focused on describing the sexual behaviors of adolescent girls and determining which factors affect whether or not girls engage in various sexual behaviors or the age at which girls first engage in them. Few studies examine what sexual behaviors or sexual feelings mean to adolescent girls or the function these feelings and behaviors serve in their lives. Two recent reviews of adolescent sexuality research mention no studies that address the meaning of sexuality to adolescents or consider the different functions it may serve for different adolescents (Katchadourian, 1990; Miller & Moore, 1990). In fact, one of these reviews explicitly mentioned that the research “neglects the subjective dimension, the thoughts and feelings of adolescents themselves” because the social science perspective has focused almost exclusively on adolescent behavior (Katchadourian, 1990, p. 331).
Jerome Kagan wisely wrote, “the effects of most experiences are not fixed but depend upon the child’s interpretation” (1984, p. 240). Kagan’s assertion regarding the salience of meaning is echoed by social construe tionists (Gergen, 1988). It is not enough for researchers to ask girls only about the sexual behaviors in which they engage and then correlate their behavior with a variety of variables measuring psychological functioning (or dysfunctioning). To understand the development of sexuality and the impact of sexuality on adolescent girls’ lives, researchers must ask about their subjective understanding of their behavior and their feelings.
Consider Betsy, a 17-year-old adolescent girl who has always had strained relationships with her family, has not experienced success in ac ademic or athletic settings, has abused drugs and alcohol, is sexually active with her new boyfriend, and rarely uses any form of contraception. Contrast Betsy with Denise, who is also 17 and has a strong attachment to her family, is functioning well in her academic and peer settings, is also sexually active, and uses contraception regularly with her boyfriend of 6 months. Betsy’s understanding of sexuality may be that it gives her a high, that it serves as a temporary pleasure to escape her problems, that it allows her to retain her boyfriend, or that it is the only domain in which she expe riences a sense of competence or esteem. Sex for Denise may represent a physical expression of her intimacy with her boyfriend, a way of experi menting or discovering how to physically pleasure another and be plea sured, or a way of rebelling against her parents. The information that both of these 17-year-old girls are sexually active captures little of the diverse experiences these two have of their sexuality or, potentially, of the impact their sexualities may have on their development.
The usefulness of incorporating subjective understanding, or meaning, into studies of behavior has been demonstrated in other domains once dominated exclusively by behavioral investigations such as understanding the impact of family behaviors on adolescent development (Callan & Noller, 1986; Powers &. Welsh, 1998; Powers, Welsh, & Wright, 1994; Welsh, Galliher, & Powers, 1998) and predicting marital satisfaction from couples’ interaction (Gottman et al., 1976; Levenson & Gottman, 1983; Markman, 1979, 1981), and most recently in understanding adolescents in dating relationships (Welsh, Galliher, Kawaguchi, & Rostosky, in press). Researchers in these fields previously examined specific behaviors and then correlated the behaviors with the outcomes of interest. Ascertaining the meaning of the behaviors to the research participants themselves has added important information necessary for understanding the phenomena being studied.
Research on adolescent sexuality, previously behaviorally oriented, also benefits from including adolescents’ own subjective understandings of their behaviors and feelings. For example, Miller, Christensen, and Olson (1987) found the relationship between sexual behavior and adolescents’ self-esteem was moderated by adolescents’ attitudes toward sex. Specifically, adolescents engaging in intercourse who felt that premarital sexual inter course was acceptable had high self-esteem. Adolescents engaging in in tercourse who felt that premarital intercourse was wrong had lower self esteem. This finding suggests that these adolescents may be ascribing different meanings to their sexual behaviors, and, potentially, that these different meanings, rather than the sexual behavior itself, impact adoles cents differentially.
A few research teams have recently begun to explicitly investigate the meaning and functions of sexuality to adolescents. For example, Re becca Turner and S. Shirley Feldman are in the process of conducting an interview study aimed at understanding the functions that sex serves for late adolescents. In some preliminary qualitative analyses of 60 participants of varying cultural and ethnic backgrounds, they emphasize the important role sexuality plays in adolescents’ development of autonomy and in their affect regulation (Turner & Feldman, 1994). The adolescents with whom they spoke talked about their ability to differentiate their own needs as sexual people in sexual relationships from the needs of their partners and how they struggled to negotiate these sometimes conflicting agendas. In many ways, the process adolescents described in their intimate peer rela tionships is similar to the individuation process adolescents are simulta neously negotiating in their family relationships. Trying to understand the links between adolescents’ experience of their sexual relationship contexts and their family contexts is a fascinating area in need of investigation.
A second theme that frequently surfaced in Turner and Felman’s study was how adolescents’ sexuality was reflexively connected to their emotional well-being. They used sex to control their affect, to cope with life’s diffi culties, and also in response to their affect. They talked about how sex made them feel wonderful, how sex made them feel terrible, how sex made them feel out of control, and how sex gave them control. Turner and Feldman (1994) interviewed both men and women and did not try to examine gender differentially in this initial analysis. It will be interesting to see the ways in which these late adolescent men and women experience their sexuality similarly and the ways in which their experiences differ.
In another qualitative interview study, Deborah Tolman (1994) explored adolescent girls’ experience of sexual desire. She found, in contrast to our cultural myth that girls only have sex in order to get emotional intimacy (i. e., sex in exchange for love from men), that 60% of the girls she interviewed reported experiencing sexual desire, while only 3 out of 30 (10%) denied experiencing sexual desire. The girls who discussed experiencing sexual feelings talked about their sexuality as a feature of a relationship. However, Tolman discerned,
these girls make a key distinction between their sexual desire and their wish for a relationship. While their feelings of sexual desire most often arise in the context of relationships, they are not the same as or a substitute for wanting relationships. Rather, these girls say that sexual desire is a specific “feeling,” a powerful feeling of wanting that the majority of these girls experience and describe as having to do with sex and with their bodies, a feeling to which they respond in the context of the many relationships that constitute their lives. (Tolman,
1994, p. 255)
A recent study conducted by Susan and Clyde Hendrick (1994) used both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to investigate the role of gender in adolescents’ perspectives of their sexuality. Interestingly, they found different results from the different methodologies. When they asked participants about their sexuality using a questionnaire measure, they found gender differences in participants’ attitudes toward sexuality. Specifically, they found men to have more of a recreational orientation toward sex, whereas women were more inclined to take a relational orientation toward sexuality. The Hendricks then conducted a qualitative study in which they asked men and women to describe their sexual relationships. When they used this qualitative methodology, they found few differences in the de scriptions provided. Both viewed their sexual relationships as relational and highlighted both companionate and passionate aspects of their relation ships.
Taken together, these studies of adolescent girls’ sexuality exemplify a recent shift in research focus. They begin to identify areas in need of further clarification. Specifically, they emphasize the need to clarify the role of gender, relationship, and methodology in understanding the mean ing of sexuality to adolescents. It is hoped that the interesting implications of these early studies will encourage others interested in adolescents’ sex uality to incorporate analyses of adolescents’ subjective understanding of their sexuality into their research designs.