Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Casual sexual relationships and experiences CSREs are still considered to be detrimental to the psychological well-being of youth even though findings remain inconclusive.
Most studies have focused on emerging adulthood. The findings underscored the importance of using caution when arguing that CSREs are detrimental or harmless to the psychological well-being of adolescents. The results also highlight the importance of taking into account gender and forms of CSREs in prevention and health interventions. Keywords: casual sex, psychological well-being, adolescents, substance use, sexual behavior. The association of casual sexual relationships and experiences CSREs , defined as sexual contact occurring outside of a romantic or dating relationship, with psychological well-being has garnered great interest in recent years e.
Despite some evidence supporting concerns about negative outcomes associated with CSREs, findings remain inconsistent. Psychological outcomes have mainly been investigated among college students and rarely among adolescents. Adolescents may also be more impacted because CSREs could be considered a violation of age norms Meier, Studies of young adults suggested that at least half of college students have had a CSRE within the past few months This study sought to fill some gaps in the existing literature.
First, studies with adolescents generally focused on depressive symptoms e. However, depressive symptoms may co-occur with multiple symptoms of other psychological problems Starr et al. Thus, we extended our study to other underexplored indicators of CSREs among adolescent casual sex research, such as suicidal ideation, low self-esteem, and consumption of alcohol or drugs.
Second, we used a longitudinal design to better understand the direction of the link between psychological well-being and CSREs e. Third, we distinguished the type of sexual partners. To our knowledge, only one previous study among adolescents did this i. This distinction is important since well-being outcomes may be different depending on the types of casual sexual partners Bersamin et al. Fourth, this study examined changes in psychological well-being across different sexual intimacy levels i.
