Publication details
Autonomy and Motivations to Have Sex in Emerging Adulthood
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Citation | |
| Description | The purpose of the present analysis was to investigate the hypothesis that the more intrinsic motives should support agentic autonomy whereas the more intrinsic motives would thwart it. Data come from an ongoing Czech longitudinal study “Paths to adulthood” focusing on the development of autonomy and identity over the period of emerging adulthood. The sample sizes dropped from 1674 at the beginning to 998 in the most recent wave (77% of females, aged 18 to 30). Agentic autonomy has been repeatedly measured by a Czech translation of the 7-item autonomy subscale of the Basic Psychological Needs Satisfaction scale. Five dimensions of the motivation to have sex have been measured by a Czech translation of the Perceived Locus of Causality for Sex scale. These include intrinsic, extrinsic, identified, integrated, introjected motives to have sex. Latent profile analysis was used to identify four meaningful classes of motivations to have sex. These classes differ mainly in the shape of the profile, less in the overall level of motivation to have sex. Mean agentic autonomy does not correlate saliently with any of the five dimensions of the motivation to have sex. However, there are small and meaningful differences between classes with different profiles of motivations for sex. The class characteristic by extrinsic motivation higher than all other motivation dimension showed the lowest agentic autonomy. The class characteristic by extrinsic and introjected motivation higher than the more internalized dimensions of motivation had the second lowest agentic autonomy. On the other hand, relatively higher agentic autonomy was found in the two classes characterized by relatively lower levels of extrinsic and introjected motivation. The differences between classes were small explaining about 3% of individual differences in agentic autonomy (max Cohen d=0,52). No gender differences were found in the above analyses. Although the pattern of results is not straightforward and autonomy shows only very weak correlations with absolute levels of the scales of sexual motivation, when relative levels of sexual motives are considered data seem to support the hypothesis that when external and self-enhancement motivation is higher than other dimensions of motivation autonomy appears to be thwarted. |
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