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Young adults have high rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Sexual minority youths' risk for STIs, including HIV, is as high as or higher than sexual majority peers'. Sexual safety, while often treated as a single behavior such as condom use, can be best conceptualized as the result of multiple factors. We used latent class analysis to identify profiles based on ever-used sexual safety strategies and lifetime number of partners among 425 self-identified LGBTQ youth aged 14-19. Data collection took place anonymously online. We identified four specific subgroup profiles for males and three for females, with each subgroup representing a different level and type of sexual safety. Profiles differed from each other in terms of age and outness for males, and in outness, personal homonegativity, and amount of education received about sexual/romantic relationships for females. Youths' sexual safety profiles have practice implications for sexuality educators, health care professionals, and parents., (Copyright © 2013 The Foundation for Professionals in Services for Adolescents. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Although there are now several adolescent HIV and STD preventive interventions of demonstrated efficacy in the literature, little is understood about the portability of these interventions. This study replicated Stanton's Focus on Kids intervention, developed for inner city African American adolescents, in a different population, transferring it to a multicultural city. Despite careful replication of the original study's procedures, youth in the preventive intervention condition of the replication study did not improve in attitudes, perceived norms, self-efficacy, or intentions toward sexual initiation, condom use, or abstinence compared with a carefully matched control condition. We discuss several possible reasons for this failure to replicate, concluding that the most likely reason is the lower rates of sexual activity among youth in the replication city.

Context: Alcohol consumption often has been cited as increasing adolescents' risk of HIV, and several studies have shown positive relationships between drinking and risky sexual behavior among adolescents. Because most of these studies used global measures of drinking and risky sex, and conducted comparisons across persons, they could not determine whether alcohol use was a cause of risky sex or simply a correlate., Methods: A sample of 112 U.S. adolescents completed daily diaries about their health behaviors, including drinking and intercourse, for eight weeks. In analyses using t-tests and hierarchical linear modeling, each respondent's rate of condom use after drinking was compared with his or her rate of use when not drinking, and predictors of condom use were examined, Results: Rates of condom use did not differ significantly between sexual events preceded by drinking (use in 54% of events) and those not preceded by drinking (use in 52% of events). Condoms were more likely to be used during sexual events with casual partners than in those with steady partners, less likely to be used on occasions when other birth control was used and more likely to be used when the sexual encounter was expected. In the multivariate analyses, the odds of condom use were not associated either with whether a teenager had been drinking before sex or with the quantity of alcohol consumed., Conclusions: These findings challenge the widely accepted hypothesis that drinking is a cause of sexual risk-taking. Rather, they underscore the need for interventions to increase teenagers'access to and ability to use condoms.

Objective: Retrospective reports of the association between drinking and high-risk sexual behavior can be biased by implicit theories of the effects of drinking or may represent post hoc justifications instead of accurate reports of behavior. Using data from a daily diary study, we compared daily reports of condom use when drinking and not drinking with the same participants' reports of these behaviors from a retrospective questionnaire administered after diary collection was complete. Method: Participants included adolescents (n = 145), adult sexually transmitted disease clinic clients (n = 167), college students (n = 145), and men who have sex with men (n = 147). All participants reported their alcohol consumption and sexual activity daily for 8 weeks and then completed a retrospective questionnaire about their behavior over the diary period. Results: Participants' retrospective judgments about whether they used condoms more or less when drinking were not significantly related to their behavior as reported in the diary. Fewer than two thirds of the participants were accurate in their recollection of the association of condom use and drinking. Teenagers and men who have sex with men were more likely to retrospectively overestimate the negative effect of alcohol on condom use. Conclusions: Retrospective questions about the association between drinking and condom use were consistent with actual behavior only among people who consistently either never or always used condoms. These individuals correctly reported that drinking had no effect on their condom use. For people whose condom use varies, questions about associations between drinking and sex may be difficult to answer, owing to their conditional nature, and may lead to error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]