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04 Apr 2007 10:49 am

High School Sex

Well, that headline should get some Google traffic. But there's an Ohio State University study of who hooks up with whom in an anonymous high school, and the results don't look like an adult network. Money quote:

For the first time, sociologists have mapped the romantic and sexual relationships of an entire high school over 18 months, providing evidence that these adolescent networks may be structured differently than researchers previously thought.

The results showed that, unlike many adult networks, there was no core group of very sexually active people at the high school. There were not many students who had many partners and who provided links to the rest of the community.

Instead, the romantic and sexual network at the school created long chains of connections that spread out through the community, with few places where students directly shared the same partners with each other. But they were indirectly linked, partner to partner to partner. One component of the network linked 288 students – more than half of those who were romantically active at the school – in one long chain.

You really are sleeping with everyone else your hook-up may have slept with. The lack of any hub makes intervention to prevent STD spread much harder. You have to come up with a general message rather than targeting a small group first. Why so few gays? It's high school, I guess. And all of this is based on reported hook-ups, so who knows what the reality truly is.

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