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This study of the casual sexual partnering of 570 male and 776 female Australian high school students on a "schoolies week" vacation expands on earlier research on factors that influence the sexual activity of vacationing youth. Over 60% of the men and nearly 40% of the women who engaged in sexual intercourse during schoolies week did so with a casual partner. We used logistic regression to test an expanded version of Triandis' Theory of Interpersonal Behavior (TIB) in explaining casual sexual partnering. Situational experiences (similar to what others have called situational disinhibition), prior sexual experiences and intentions (similar to what others have called spillover) influenced casual sexual partnering. Different causal pathways were demonstrated for men and women.
Each year thousands of Australian youth, newly graduated or in their last years of high school, descend on the Australian Gold Coast during late November and early December. These "schoolies," as they are commonly called, are participating in an annual beach-side phenomenon similar to the North American "spring break" holiday that has recently received considerable research attention (e.g., Josiam, Hobson, Dietrich, & Smeaton, 1998; Maticka-Tyndale, Herold, & Mewhinney, 1998; Mattila, Apostolopoulos, Sonmez, Yu, & Sasidharan, 2001). Both schoolies week and spring break are holidays when youth travel with friends and gather in large numbers, typically at beach resorts, with the goal of an adult-free, responsibility-free, fun time. Advertisements for both holidays stress a carefree party atmosphere complete with easy availability of alcohol and sex (Mewhinney, Herold, & Maticka-Tyndale, 1995; Smith & Rosenthal, 1997). One key difference between the Australian and North American experience is the age of the vacationers. Spring breakers are college and university students whose ages cluster between 19 and 21 years for students in the United States (Josiam et al., 1998) and 21 and 23 years for students in Canada (Maticka-Tyndale et al., 1998), while schoolies are typically new high school graduates or students in their final year of high school with a mean age less than 18 years (Smith & Rosenthal, 1997). The schoolie and spring break environments provide settings for research on how social and situational contexts influence sexual activity.
Prior research with Canadian and American university students on spring break used Triandis' theory of interpersonal behavior (TIB) as an explanatory framework...