Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Direct correspondence to: Jeremy E. Using data from the Duke Hookup Survey, we consider how motivations for hooking up cluster to produce different classes, or profiles, of students who hook up, and how these classes are related to hookup regret. We find a number of differences in hookup motivation classes across social characteristics, including gender, year in school, race-ethnicity, self-esteem, and attitudes about sexual behavior outside committed relationships.
Additionally, Uninspireds regret hookups more frequently than members of the other classes, and Uninhibiteds report regret less frequently than Utilitarians and Uninspireds. These findings reveal the complexity of motivations for hooking up and the link between motivations and regret. Keywords: hooking up, motivations, sexual regret, college students, sexual behavior.
Like many aspects of American family life, the courtship practices of young adults have undergone significant changes over the past 50 years. A hookup is usually defined and understood as a casual physical encounter—ranging from kissing to sexual intercourse—between two people for whom there is no expectation of a committed relationship. Given that negative and ambivalent reactions to hooking up are commonplace—nearly half of women and about one quarter of men report having a negative emotional reaction to hooking up, and around one quarter of both women and men report ambivalent reactions Owen et al.
Although there is a growing body of literature on motivations for hooking up e. The prevalence of negative and ambivalent reactions, however, suggests that there may be complex sets of motivations for the behavior that are not captured by the typical analytic approach employed in the study of hookup motivations.
Indeed, we lack an understanding of how different motivations for hooking up operate concurrently within individuals as they make sexual decisions. Single-item measures of motivations are descriptively interesting and have important theoretical implications, but this variable-centered approach ignores the ways in which different motivations operate together for some individuals. A person-centered approach allows for the analysis of how people mix and match certain motivations to explain their behavior.
