This dissertation comprises two empirical articles investigating the influences of household-level disruption and sexual victimization on the sexual and reproductive behavior of young South Africans, and a third identifying methodological limitations of research on sexual victimization. In particular, the empirical articles examine whether: 1) Household-level disruptions are associated with increases in young people’s risky sexual behavior and whether disruptions accumulate to produce greater influences; and whether 2) Sexual victimization increases the likelihood of adolescent pregnancy. Each uses a multi-disciplinary perspective to identify and address important gaps in the literature and the analysis on sexual victimization corrects significant methodological shortcomings of previous research. Taken together, the articles underscore the need for more and better research on the influences of trauma and disruption on the lives of young people and provide some direction for these efforts.
Results indicate that young people experiencing a single household-level disruption or multiple disruptions do not demonstrate increased sexual activity or involvement with older partners, nor are they less likely to use condoms. I discuss data limitations that may explain these findings and suggest improvements to future research. Conversely, experiencing some forms of sexual victimization is associated with an increased hazard of adolescent pregnancy. Unexpectedly, however, respondents who were the most severely sexually victimize were no more likely to become pregnant during adolescence than respondents who were not sexually victimized. These results suggest that existing theories may need modification to account for a wider range of individual behaviors.
The third article provides a substantive methodological critique of existing research on sexual victimization and offers examples of how limitations and inconsistencies in definitions, methods, and measures may affect the research findings and impede the accumulation of knowledge. In particular, it identifies methodological shortcomings that undermine the validity of previous findings, including the lack of attention to racial/ethnic diversity and other sample selectivity, problematic assumptions underlying survey questionnaires, and issues related to temporal ordering and confounding variables. Furthermore, it describes some methodological and analytical decisions made by scholars of this research that make it difficult to compare findings across studies and determine the state of knowledge on the topic.Ph.D.SociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/60663/1/susanml_1.pd
