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Religious Influence on Older Americans’ Sexual Lives: A Nationally-Representative Profile

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Abstract

This study investigated the relationship between religious influence and sexual expression in older Americans, with specific attention to gender. Using the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project, a nationally-representative survey of older adults, we created a composite measure of religious influence on sexual expression using Latent Class Analysis. We found more variability within denominations than between in terms of membership in the high-influence class; this indicated that religious influence on sexual expression was diverse within faiths. We show that religious influence was associated with higher self-reported satisfaction with frequency of sex, as well as higher physical and emotional satisfaction with sex, but only for men. Men were also significantly more likely than women to report that they would only have sex with a person they love. These results persisted in the presence of controls for demographic characteristics, religious affiliation, church attendance, intrinsic religiosity, political ideology, and functional health.

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Notes

  1. NSHAP’s sampling frame involved probability proportionate to size selection of U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas, random sampling of area segments within primary units, and a complete listing and screening of all housing units within the area segment. This approach included an oversampling of African-American and Hispanic participants, as well as the oldest old (85 and up). All results were weighted according to the probability weights derived from this sampling frame.

  2. We selected these questions based on whether religions and religious denominations in the United States often provide normative injunctions which regulate these activities or attitudes, in part because they depart from treating sex as a procreational rather than recreational activity (Laumann et al., 1994).

  3. Only 1440 participants answered whether they refused sex for the sake of their religious beliefs because only participants who had not had sex in the past 3 months were asked this question. We would not want to limit our analysis only to those participants who have not had sex in the past three months; FIML allows us to include all participants in our LCA, regardless of whether they were asked this question.

  4. The package does this by drawing simulations of the model parameters from their asymptotic sampling distribution. When the regression has a logit link function, the distribution is a multivariate normal with a mean equal to the parameter estimates and a variance equal to the variance–covariance matrix of the parameter estimates. It then creates multiple simulations in order to produce distributions for these parameter estimates, and thus confidence intervals. Then the program converts the simulated parameters into predicted probabilities and first differences in order to simplify the interpretation of the model. The only restriction is that all variables in the model must be set to specific values. Because predicted probabilities have to be computed after setting the controls to some value, these probabilities refer only to a certain portion of the population. These are the modal values for each of the variables. Years of education was set to 12 because this is the median value for this variable.

  5. Because we wanted to ensure that we were measuring religious influence, we also re-estimated the LCA excluding masturbation and divorce. This LCA also produced two classes of high and low religious influence, and 97.3 % of cases that were classified as "high influence" in the above LCA were classified as "high influence" in the second LCA. Furthermore, we re-ran all analyses in this article using results from the second LCA, and the results were very similar.

  6. In fact, we find that if the overall proportion of the sample in the high influence class is 0.63, the SD of this proportion is 0.48, decomposable into a between-denomination SD of 0.19, and a within-denomination standard deviation of 0.46. These data suggest a great deal of within-denomination variability.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    James Iveniuk & Kathleen A. Cagney

  2. Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Colm O’Muircheartaigh

  3. 254 Castlefield Ave., Toronto, ON, M4R 1G7, Canada

    James Iveniuk

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  1. James Iveniuk
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  3. Kathleen A. Cagney
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Correspondence to James Iveniuk.

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Iveniuk, J., O’Muircheartaigh, C. & Cagney, K.A. Religious Influence on Older Americans’ Sexual Lives: A Nationally-Representative Profile. Arch Sex Behav 45, 121–131 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-015-0534-0

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