Formal and informal sources of sexual information predict women’s sexual self-schema

Abstract

Sexual self-schema (SSS) reflect an individual’s cognitive representations of oneself as a sexual person, and predict critical sexual health and wellbeing outcomes in women. Like other cognitive structures, SSS are thought to form through exposure to different kinds of information. The current exploratory study investigated associations between young women’s experiences with different sources of sexual information and their SSS valence and complexity. Respondents (n = 401) completed a validated SSS measure and ranked their perceived importance of different sources of sexual information as they were growing up. We found that the more important women perceived their friends as sources of sexual information, the more consistently their SSS was negative or aschematic (i.e., neither positive nor negative). In contrast, the more important they ranked partners, the more their SSS was positive or coschematic (i.e., both positive and negative). Finally, the more important women ranked religion, the more their SSS was consistently negative. Overall, preliminary associations suggest that friends, partners, and religion influence young women’s SSS valence and complexity. Further research may examine directionality and mechanistic causality of these associations, as well as how multiple varied sources of information interact to produce diverse SSS configurations.