The sexual realities of today’s youth: inequalities, relationships, identities – JEUNES

The project relies on an ambitious investigation that articulates different sources and methods. First, a questionnaire survey, representative of young people aged 18 to 29 years old is conducted: only a national survey can indeed overlook the diversity of intimate relationships during youth. Second, a qualitative study based on interviews aims to understand how young people make sense of their experiences, and to grasp deepen the understanding of certain elements that the statistical survey has difficulties to grasp.

Will be published soon

Will be published soon

Will be published soon

This project focuses on the new ways in which young people start their romantic and sexual lives. It looks at the recent changes in young people’s life conditions by focusing on intimate relationships. Whereas young people’s educational and professional trajectories are well documented, little scholarly attention has been paid to changes in private life. These changes are however numerous. The postponement of first couple formation has opened up for a diversity of sexual experiences during youth. Furthermore, we can see a politicisation of sexual issues, a growing visibility and acceptance of homosexuality, new gender identities, and new practices linked to the rise of digital technology, such as online dating and increasing use of Internet porn.

The aim of the project is to grasp these changes, and the new inequalities they convey. Contrarily to a homogenous approach to sexual youth, the project aims to understand the differences in young adults experiences. In doing so, it draws special attention to inequalities in intimate life, depending on social, gendered, territorial and racial characteristics. Inequality is understood as a question of access to partners and possibilities of expressing ones sexuality. Do all young adults have the same access to sexual experimentation and, if not, who are those who are excluded?

In order to answer this question, we adopt a twofold approach. First, taking on a materialistic viewpoint, the project pays attention to the socio-economic dimensions of intimate life. Indeed, sexual interaction depends on having access to a private space, and “getting involved” with someone calls for financial resources. Contrarily to an overly “idealistic” approach – considering recent changes in sexuality as due primarily to a change in norms – the project looks at the material conditions in which young people enter sexuality and couple life. We make the hypothesis that different living conditions create different, and unequal, relationship trajectories.

Second, the project relies on a relation approach. It takes interest in the diversification of intimate relationships that have developed over the last decades. The aim is empirical – recent changes call for a study of this new relational diversity – but it also comes with a new methodological and theoretical perspective. Whereas sociologists most often study sexual behaviours by looking at individual characteristics (who does what?) a relational approach puts focus on the context (who does what with whom?). The underlying hypothesis is that sexual behaviour depends not only on individual determinants but also on the nature of the relationship that thus calls for attention.

This research program calls for an ambitious investigation that articulates different sources and methods. First, the project relies on a questionnaire survey, representative of young people aged 18 to 29 years old: only a national survey can indeed overlook the diversity of intimate relationships during youth. Second, a qualitative study based on interviews aims to understand how young people name and distinguish between their relationships, and to deepen the understanding of certain elements that the statistical survey has difficulties to grasp, such as sexual violence for example. Third, the project makes use of “big data” from an online dating app. This new source of data provide a unique opportunity to empirically observe dating. By providing information on contact behaviour (who contacts whom?), it makes it possible to objectify the underlying selection-rejection process in dating.