Social networks of adolescents and sexual behaviours

Abstract

Background

Adolescence is a period of human life between childhood and adulthood that involves enormous physical, mental and social changes. Rapid growth in use of social networking platforms and communication devices has brought both benefits and drawbacks to the lives of adolescents, including their sexual behaviour. Recent developments in social network analysis (SNA) offer a better understanding of the interactions between human social networks and behaviours.

Method

The SNAP study was a longitudinal cohort study conducted in Australia between August 2015 and December 2018. The PhD candidate conducted secondary data analysis of the SNAP data using UCINET social network analysis software.

Results

Participants were 15–17 years old and enrolled in grades 9–12 in high schools at the beginning of the study. Those with networks that had a stronger average tie strength (a combination of time spent and emotional intensity between two people) were more likely to have wanted sex and score higher in enjoying sex in cross-sectional analyses. Cross-sectional analyses showed that those in a network with a high ego density (percentage of all possible ties in a person’s network that are present) were less likely to have casual sex partners and unwanted sex.

Those who had higher efficiency (total number of nonredundant people reached by the primary contact) in the network were more likely to have multiple sexual partners and casual sex partners, and less likely to score high in enjoyment of sex. Those who showed higher centrality of betweenness (the frequency with which a person is on the shortest path between two other people in a network) were more likely to have casual sex partners.

The findings lead to the conclusion that well-connected networks, made up of friends with similar educational backgrounds and with whom they are close, support adolescents to practise healthy sexual behaviours.