Social Motivations for College Hookups
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Social Motivations for College Hookups Shemeka Thorpe1 · Arielle Kuperberg2 Accepted: 5 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Hookups are a normative experience for college students with 72% of college students reporting hooking up by their Senior year. Although there is over a decade of research on hookups, what motivates college students to participate in hookups is not clear, with prior research focused mostly on psychological rather than social motivations, and differences by gender, but not exploring whether students differ in hookup motivations by other factors. This study explored whether students hooked up and hookup motivations among a random sample of 180 heterosexual college students at a Southeast university, and differences by demographic characteristics, marital age expectations, and parent and peers’ marital status. Results showed the majority of participants hookup up to feel sexual pleasure, with a significant minority motivated by relationship formation and the ‘college experience.’ Significant predictors of hookup motivations include gender, mother’s education, religiosity, parent’s coupled status, and friends’ marital status, while race and age differences were not significant. Results of a latent class analyses showed five distinct classes of social hookup motivations: older and younger abstainers, relationship seekers, pleasure pathway, and college scripts. Implications for future research are discussed. Keywords Hookups · Motivations · Latent class analysis · College students
* Shemeka Thorpe [email protected] Arielle Kuperberg [email protected] 1
The Department of Public Health Education, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, PO Box 26170, Greensboro, NC 27402, USA
2
Department of Sociology and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA
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S. Thorpe, A. Kuperberg
Introduction The past 50 years have seen various changes in traditional American sexual and romantic partnering with ‘hookups’ increasingly becoming an expected part of the ‘college experience’ (Bogle 2008; Wade 2017). Hookups are casual sexual encounters that can range from kissing to sexual intercourse (Bogle 2008; Kuperberg and Padgett 2016). The number of college students who have been found to hookup varies across time and population, from 40% of all women in older research (Glenn and Marquardt 2001) to 60% of all undergraduate students (Kuperberg and Padgett 2016) to 72% of all Seniors (England et al. 2008). Recent research finds students are now as likely to ‘hookup’ as they are to go on a traditional date, and report more hookup experiences than dates (Kuperberg and Padgett 2016). Hookups are then a normative experience for most college students (England et al. 2008; Garcia et al. 2012; Kalish and Kimmel 2011; Reiber and Garcia 2010) despite them sometimes resulting in negative emotional and psychological outcomes, lack of satisfaction and enjoyment amo
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