Community-Level Influences and the Sexual Behavior of Young Black South Africans

Most existing research concerning community influences on young people’s behavior has been conducted in the United States, with its particular social and economic context. Using a large sample of young people from the Durban metropolitan area in South Africa linked to several sources of community-level information, we examine associations between concentrated disadvantage, social disorder, and social cohesion and sexual debut and unprotected sex. Using multilevel discrete time hazard models and multilevel logistic regression models, we find that net of a wide array of individual and household characteristics, young men and women in communities with relatively high levels of concentrated disadvantage have a greater hazard of sexual debut and a higher risk of unprotected sex. Sex-stratified models reveal that the impact of concentrated disadvantage is greater for females when considering sexual debut, but does not differ by sex in models predicting unprotected sex. Our results regarding social disorder and social cohesion, by contrast, show only mixed support for expectations based on US theories. Social disorder is positively associated with the hazard of sexual debut, though only for females, and social disorder is unexpectedly negatively associated with the risk of unprotected sex for males. Social cohesion reduces the risk of unprotected sex, but only for males. We discuss these results in light of previous work on contextual effects in the US and the backdrop of the HIV epidemic in South Africa.

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