Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source.
Although there is over a decade of research on hookups, what motivates college students to participate in hookups is not clear, with prior research focused mostly on psychological rather than social motivations, and differences by gender, but not exploring whether students differ in hookup motivations by other factors.
Results of a latent class analyses showed five distinct classes of social hookup motivations: older and younger abstainers, relationship seekers, pleasure pathway, and college scripts. Implications for future research are discussed. Hookups are casual sexual encounters that can range from kissing to sexual intercourse Bogle ; Kuperberg and Padgett Hookups are then a normative experience for most college students England et al.
Social scripts are a set of expectations that individuals have about how a given encounter or situation will unfold, and can be shaped by demographic characteristics and social contexts, including the behavior and experiences of peers and family Kuperberg and Padgett Finally, while past research has found a positive association between hooking up and having an older ideal age at marriage, and distinct patterns in hookups and desire for more hookup opportunities by race, age and sexual orientation Allison and Risman ; Kuperberg and Padgett , research has not examined whether specific hookup motivations differ by race, age, religiosity, ideal age at marriage, or other social contextual measures of marriage such as the marital status of parents or peers or the education and therefore educational experiences of parents, with past demographic comparisons of motivations only examining gender or partner type differences Weitbrecht and Whitton A large body of psychological literature has explored human motivations for having sex and casual sex specifically, but there is limited research on hookup motivations, especially outside of psychological motivations.
Qualitative research argues that hookups are increasingly an expected part of the college experience Wade , suggesting that these expectations may be an important motivation for some to participate in the practice. Regan and Dreyer found over 32 motivations for casual sex that they grouped into five general motive categories: personal intra-individual motivations, social-environmental motivations, physical-environmental motivations, interpersonal motivations, and other motivations.
