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For many emerging adults, committed romantic relationships are perceived as offering the ideal context for sexual exploration and companionship. However, these relationships are often short-term and breakups between committed partners can be emotionally intense and create a significant amount of distress. While casual sex relationships appear to be an increasingly popular alternative, providing many of the same benefits of committed relationships without the emotional involvement, they are also consistently associated with sexual regret. Previous research indicates that both emotional reactions are reported at higher levels by women, but the extent to which breakup distress and sexual regret differ by relationship type remains unclear. The current study examined differences in breakup distress and sexual regret as a function of sex and type of sexual relationship (committed vs casual) among a sample of 230 undergraduate college students. As expected, women reported more breakup distress and sexual regret as compared to men, and men and women in committed relationships reported more breakup distress than those in casual relationships. Contrary to previous findings, there was no significant difference in sexual regret between committed and casual relationships, and this was consistent for both men and women. In addition, participants reported relatively low levels of both breakup distress and sexual regret overall. The results suggest that, in general, breakups may not pose a severe emotional threat to young adults, who seem to be confident in their sexual decision making regardless of relationship type.

This exploratory research aims to contribute to a greater understanding of the strategic roles and incidental or deliberate sex drug associations relating to an emerging club drug called Mephedrone.

A qualitative phenomenological approach was utilized to analyze 22 in depth interviews in order to describe users' perceptions of this drug's impact on their sexual ideation and practises, while under the influence.

The finds that disinhibition involving compulsive masturbation, homosexual fantasies in heterosexuals, propositioning of strangers, promiscuity, prolonged marathon drug‐sex encounters involving casual/multiple partners and unsafe sexual practices [UAS/UVS] were all common, with gender differences present in terms of perceived connectivity with partners.

The research underscores the need for greater public health awareness and targeted drug‐sex interventions.

What is marriage? Existing treatments identify the gains to marriage but say little regarding the foundations of the institution itself. This paper proposes that marriage is designed to facilitate sexual co‐operation in a world without reliable contraception and paternity verifiability. By allocating control rights, it functions to mitigate the hazards of sexual opportunism. Recently, however, the technology shocks of the pill, legal abortion and paternity testing have weakened the links between marriage and both sex and reproduction. This has undermined the traditional justification for marriage. What remains is a bundle of legal and economic benefits that are gradually losing significance as the focus of family law shifts from marriage to parenthood as its fundamental organising principle.

This study aimed to determine the prevalence of and factors associated with contraceptive use among school-going adolescents.

A cross-sectional study was conducted among vocational school students in Phitsanulok, Northern Thailand. The study employed a multistage random sampling technique to select 391 students from three schools that were purposively selected.

The prevalence of contraceptive use during the most recent sexual intercourse was 75.8%. The condom was the most commonly used contraceptive method, followed by emergency pills and the rhythm/calendar method. Being male, in the second academic year, sexual communication with parents, sex with a casual partner or sex worker and contraceptive use at sexual initiation were significant risk factors for contraceptive use (p < 0.05). The preventive factors were subdistrict municipality area residency, extended family, medium or high income and partners who drank (p < 0.05).

The authors found a high prevalence of contraceptive use among school-going adolescents. Maintaining and improving this trend would require a concerted effort from all stakeholders to promote early sexuality communication and ensure access and use of contraceptive services.

Existing literature argues that the expression of delinquency is common during childhood and especially adolescence. Here, the practice of delinquent behaviours increases the risk of disrupting one’s trajectories of educational and labour market attainment. Delinquent youths, particularly those behaving delinquently severely, are prone to be undereducated, under- or unemployed, earning less, enjoying fewer employment welfare benefits and entitled to fewer job promotion opportunities. Given their sociological background, the author is interested in understanding how juvenile delinquency is socially constructed and reproduced. There are a variety of major key risk factors of the social construction of juvenile delinquency, including familial, or parental in particular, issues, the experience of any form of violence, the act of imitation, and psychological and emotional distress. In this book, the author will examine the socioeconomic, sociocultural and psychosocial factors that lead to the entrenched problems of youth delinquency. Per the United Nations, youth is defined as individuals aged from 15 to 24 years old. There are ample practical problems in adopting a legal definition to understand delinquency, because, for example, what is regarded as legal or not is often poorly defined and rather subjective. Also, legal definitions vary over time, barring a clear, standardised understanding of the word ‘delinquency’. In scholarly discourse, juvenile delinquency covers a multitude of sins, such as robbery, vandalism, violence, drug or alternative psychoactive substance use and the performance of some kinds of heterosexual or homosexual acts. While youth is widely interpreted as comprising individuals aged 24 years or below, the upper age limit for juvenile delinquency adopted by the English and American laws is much lower – under the age of 18 years. Given such contexts, in this book, the author primarily addresses youth/juvenile delinquent behaviours as relevant acts performed by individuals aged below 18 years. However, occasionally, the author presents survey data indicating youths’ expression of delinquency among respondents aged 24 years or below.

In this book, the author will provide reasoning on how Southeast Asian (SEA) governments, individually and collectively, have not taken an adequately aggressive, strict approach to regulating their policies against youth delinquency, prompting adolescents’ involvement in delinquent behaviours to be growing rampantly. The lack of appropriate legislative and law enforcement efforts results in significant individual and societal costs, jeopardising SEA’s pursuit of sustainable futures. Therefore, it is necessary to develop this book in order to analyse the causes and consequences of a variety of youth delinquent behaviours and its associated unequal power of relations, alongside expanding the insights of sociological inquiry into a current, ongoing phenomenon of inequalities. Policy recommendations are presented at the end of Chapters 3–5, allowing local policy-makers to evaluate the current policy development and seek possible policy amendments to efficiently and effectively cope with the notable, entrenched and multifaceted problems of youth delinquency. Outputs of this book, additionally, enable (under-)graduate students and relevant scholars and specialists focusing on SEA studies to understand the causes, effects, costs, and policy development and gaps with respect to the youth smoking epidemic, the youth drinking epidemic and youth delinquency of sexual misconduct.

One of the key highlights of this book is that the outputs suggest ways to attain more sustainable, equitable, liveable and inclusive futures in SEA other than the assessments of youth delinquency per se. In doing so, the author hopes to contribute scholarly to the understanding of how regional economic competitiveness, social cohesion and habitability can be sharpened when youth delinquency is addressed thoroughly and aptly. Moreover, when the author addresses youth delinquency, they identify how digitalisation and informationisation diversify the means for the SEA youths to gain access to tobacco products, alcohol goods, commercial sex clients and casual sex partners. Recommended policies in response to youth delinquency regionally, in part, target tightening the imposition of e-regulations by SEA governments to narrow any regulatory loopholes that relevant parties can instrumentalise on to earn lucrative profits at the expense of raising the rates of youth delinquency. In-depth analyses of both conventional and digitalised youth delinquency add further value to this book to readers’ understanding of the corresponding timely issues and recommended policy-making.

The author will, therefore, primarily explores the contexts of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Here Thailand and Malaysia are, currently, the only two regional upper-middle-income countries that share the same prospect of becoming high-income countries in the future. Indonesia, alternatively, has overtaken the Philippines as the biggest economic market and political powerhouse within the region. Therefore, compared to their less or least developed neighbouring counterparts, these countries are more prepared to develop sustainable, habitable and equitable futures while maintaining their Asian and global standings by raising economic and social competitiveness. Indonesia and Malaysia are among the two largest Muslim-majority countries in the globe. In the next chapters, the author will theorise how religious conformity deters local youths from expressing delinquency. Per Islamic laws, smoking, drinking and premature sex are prohibited. It will be interesting to explore whether religious deterrence helps prevent Indonesian and Malaysian youths from expressing delinquency. If not, the author will investigate what factors prompt local youths to behave delinquently, despite religious deterrence. Although these three countries are prioritised in the sociological discussion, the author will present some arguments and data with respect to the contexts of other SEA countries, such as the Philippines and Vietnam, to support their evaluation of youth delinquency regionwide.

Attitudes and beliefs towards marriage and family held by Chinese and American college students were compared in this study. The primary dimensions included whether to marry, age to marry, number of desired children, age to have children, perceptions of divorce, willingness to cohabit, openness to blended marriages, and gender roles within marriage. If a global convergence of cultures is occurring, then similarities should be found throughout the views of all respondents towards the institution of marriage. Dissimilarities in views could be interpreted as evidence of the entrenchment and uniqueness of culture, an outcome advanced by those who question cultural homogenisation. Hundreds of college students in several large universities in China and one regional university in the United States were surveyed at convenience. The Chinese students were found to prefer marrying and to plan having children a year later in age compared to the Americans. They also desired having nearly one fewer total number of children on average compared to the Americans. Surprisingly, the Chinese were more agreeable with divorce. The Americans were more likely to support gender equality within marriage and to accept blended types of marriage. Both groups equally approved of the overall idea of couples cohabiting if they plan on marrying. However, the Americans were far more willing to say that they themselves would cohabit. Visions of the benefits of married life were similar across countries. Overall, far more significant differences were found than no differences. The results suggest that elements of marriage norms in the world’s largest economies are somewhat constrained by social forces in their ability to completely converge.

We discuss the connections between epidemiology models and the search and matching (SAM) approach and draw conclusions about modeling the trade-offs between lockdowns and disease spread. We review the pre-COVID epidemics literature, which was mainly by epidemiologists, and the post-COVID surge in economics papers that use meeting technologies to model the trade-offs. We argue that modeling the decentralized equilibrium with economic trade-offs gives rise to substantially different results from the earlier epidemics literature, but policy action is still welfare-improving because of several externalities.

With almost half of college undergraduates engaging in friends with benefits relationships (FWBRs), the current study sought to explore the sexual decision making strategies and potential physical and psychological health outcomes behind these relationships.

Using self-report measures, Study 1 asked 207 undergraduates to rate the importance of motivations, maintenance rules, and future outcomes of FWBRs in their own personal experience and for other men and women. Study 2 sampled 142 undergraduate women who were asked to indicate the percentage of time they engaged in sexual behavior under the influence of alcohol or marijuana and the frequency with which they used safe sex practices in an FWBR.

Both genders appeared equally motivated to begin an FWBR; however women reported establishing permanence rules and avoiding over-attachment in the relationship as significantly more important than men. Men were more likely to prefer that the FWBR remain unchanged, however both genders agreed that a transition to a committed relationship was unlikely. Alcohol use was not significantly more prevalent in an FWBR, nor was the likelihood of practicing safe sex.

Both studies employed the use of self-report surveys from a single university and were subject to social desirability.

Quantitatively examining young adults’ reasoning behind choosing to engage in FWBRs provided insight into their overarching fear of “being hurt” and their preference for “easy access” to sexual experiences. These trends may suggest a shift in dating patterns and a preference for avoiding the emotional complexities of a committed, monogamous relationship.

To investigate how parental divorce and gender might influence the likelihood of engaging in a friends with benefits relationship (FWBR), and the likelihood of binge drinking and unprotected sex practices.

Using self-report measures, 99 undergraduates shared their parental marital history, experiences with FWBRs, and health risk behaviors.

Men, as compared with women, reported significantly more FWBRs as did participants with divorced/separated parents, as compared with those with married parents. Participants who had engaged in an FWBR reported significantly more binge drinking than those with no prior FWBR experience; however, no differences were found for gender or parental marital status. No significant differences emerged regarding the prevalence of unprotected sex.

The current study employed the use of self-report surveys, which can be subject to social desirability. All participants were recruited from a single liberal arts college with a limited sample of men with divorced or separated parents.

Using mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) to explore young adults’ predictors and outcomes of engaging in FWBRs provided unique insights into how gender and parental relationships influence both casual sex and health-related behaviors.

The present article focuses on the gap between motivation and action in relation to condom use among drug users in non‐commercial relationships. The study showed that most drug users were not motivated to use condoms within steady relationships. In casual sexual relationships the intention to use condoms was higher, but several enactment factors were identified that may inhibit actual condom use. These findings about the difference in perceived type of sexual relationship and of the enactment factors should be taken into account when promoting safe sex among drug users.