Socioeconomic Status

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The topic of the relationship between socioeconomic status and early adolescent sexual behavior is important because it is prevalent in today’s society. Knowing whether it is the environment, parental supervision, quality of education, or even a certain lifestyle can help reduce this behavior. Research on this kind of topic can help with interventions and create prevention methods that can lower the statistics of this activity and maybe even lower the rates of pregnancy in low income neighborhoods. Based on research, having a low socioeconomic status includes limitations in prevention and treatment services, low quality education, and social opportunities which as a result may lead to an influence in health in a person overall. Different …show more content…
With this, it is hypothesized that This positive interaction between sexual behavior and socioeconomic status may be due to lack of quality of education in addition to lack of parental supervision thus making early adolescents more susceptible to engaging in sexual behavior. In higher socioeconomic status, there is less engagement in sexual behavior in early adolescents due to better quality of education and more supervision making the direction negative. Because parents in lower social economic status tend to work more and cannot supervise children as much this results in more sexual activity as when parents in high social economic status who are more lenient with their time or can afford to pay for a babysitter or nanny for supervision, sexual engagement is less likely to happen. This hypothesis was based on two peer reviewed journals including “The Association of Sexual Behaviors With Socioeconomic Status, Family Structure, and Race/Ethnicity Among US Adolescents and Social Factors Associated with Readiness for Sexual Activity in Adolescents: A Population-Based Cohort …show more content…
Procedure
The primary conceptual variables were operationalized through 14 stem questions that asked about sexual activity within the past year in which if a certain answer was chosen to a question, the next question is based off the previous answer. Adolescents were also questioned about sexual competence, regret, contraception, autonomy, and willingness by measuring sexual intercourse within the last year and whether they were ready the last time they had sexual intercourse. To operationalize socioeconomic status, questionnaires about home life, education, and financial situation were given to the mother of the child.

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