Sexual behavior, sex-role adaptation and drinking in young women.

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Abstract
A group of 370 unmarried women students (mean age 18 yr) were classified as heavy, moderate, light or infrequent drinkers, or abstainers. Heavy drinkers who rated 2 or more escape reasons for drinking as fairly or very important were classified as heavy-escape drinkers. The women were also asked about their sexual histories, whether they ever daydreamed about pregnancy, and their feelings about abortion. They also completed 4 measures of sex-role adaptation (the femininity scale of the California Psychological Inventory, an index of traditional sex-role attitudes, a measure of sex-role style and the Franck Drawing Completion Test) and a modified version of the Thematic Apperception Test, which assessed fantasies about sexuality, relationships, pregnancy and motherhood. Heavy-escape drinkers had earlier heterosexual relationships and more frequent sexual activity, were more likely than other women drinkers to be currently sexually active and less likely to use birth control than the others. Comparisions of test results between drinkers and abstainers as well as between different categories of drinkers were equivocal and generally nonsignificant. On the fantasy measures, heavy-escape drinkers showed more ambivalence about relationships, wrote fewer stories with sex as a major theme and expressed less neutral affect about motherhood than did other drinkers. The only significant difference across drinking categories was that heavy drinkers showed more ambivalence about relationships than did light or moderate drinkers. On only 1 measure of sex-role adaptation, that concerned with traditional sex-role attitudes, were there significant differences between categories of drinkers. No clear differences on any of these measures were related to heavy-escape drinking. Discrepancies between findings of this and previous studies were discussed, and it is concluded that sex-role adaptation issues may be only epiphenomenally related to women''s drinking.

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