Attitudes Toward Nomarital Sex in 24 Countries

Journal of Sex Research, Nov, 1998 by Eric D. Widmer, Judith Treas, Robert Newcomb

That the Sexual Conservatives, Teen Permissives, and Homosexual Permissives have distinctive regimes of sexual attitudes is apparent in Figure 1. The Teen Permissives are visibly more likely than the other two clusters to see nothing wrong with premarital sex and notably less likely to judge teen sex as always wrong. Sexual Conservatives are more likely to view each type of nonmarital sex as always wrong, while Homosexual Permissives are less likely to condemn homosexual sex.(2)

How Much Sharing?

In addition to knowing the number of regimes for the countries, we have a good picture of the features of those regimes, but we still do not know how different or how similar countries are in terms of their profiles. To find out the degree to which sexual attitudes are shared across countries, we computed the sum of squares across the 24 rows of Table 1, using the "average" response--25%, the result of dividing the 100% total for each variable by four, its number of response categories--as the reference model. We used the deviation of each cell's observed proportion from .25 to compute the total sum of squares for the overall data set. To determine how much is shared by countries (shared sum of squares), we computed the sum of squares between the mean proportion for each response category across the 24 countries and the .25 proportion. Then, we compared the within- and between-clusters sum of squares (Table 2) with those numbers. The within-clusters sum of squares, the between-clusters sum of squares, and the shared sum of squares add up to the total sum of squares.

For the 24 countries, the total sum of squares is 21.7, and the shared sum of squares is 17.56. From Table 2, we know that the between sum of squares and the within sum of squares are 3.07 and 1.07 respectively. Percentages for the different sum of squares are presented in Figure 2.

[Figure 2 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

ISSP countries have a good deal in common in terms of their views on nonmarital sex. By our calculations, 81% of the variance in attitudes toward nonmarital sex is shared by the 24 countries while 14% is attributable to the six clusters and 5% to country-specific error. Note that when only 22 countries are considered (excluding Japan and the Philippines), 84% is shared, 10% is regime specific, and 6% is country specific.

DISCUSSION

Drawing on survey data from 24 countries, this paper identifies six distinctive regimes of public opinion regarding the propriety of nonmarital sex. The analysis confirms that sexual attitudes are considerably more complex than a simplistic permissive-nonpermissive typology of countries might suggest: While attitudes toward premarital sex, teen sex, extramarital sex, and homosexual sex are correlated, they relate to one another in complex ways across countries. While this finding is not likely to surprise researchers on sexuality, this paper offers rigorous confirmation for a large set of countries.

Of course, these countries do not constitute a representative sample of countries or cultures, being limited to 24 largely Western and industrialized nations which chose to participate in the 1994 International Social Survey Program. The only two Asian nations, Japan and the Philippines, each form a unique, single-country cluster. This demonstrates that they differ not only from Western countries, but also from one another. The Philippines is set apart by particularly conservative attitudes toward all forms of nonmarital sex. For Japan, it is the respondents' propensity to label premarital sex as only sometimes wrong rather than expressing strong approval or disapproval that makes it a singleton. We are hard put to interpret this unique pattern, but it is consistent with one scholar's observation that the Japanese view premarital sex with concern only when it is indiscreet or conflicts with social responsibilities (White, 1993). It might also reflect the fact that the Japanese avoid extreme response categories (Hui & Triandis, 1989), although the other three types of nonmarital sex do not elicit such ambivalent responses.