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 "When I was in clinic seeing teenagers, there was something
intangible about a kid who had a sense of purpose in life, saw life
as having some kind of meaning beyond their immediate pleasure,"
said Dr. Nancy Dodson, who led the study while at Boston Children’s
Hospital.
"I felt like those kids tended to protect themselves from a lot of
risky behavior and there are other kids who are sort of (just)
interested in feeling good for the moment . . . those kids tended to
gravitate towards risky behaviors," Dodson said in an email.
Even with improvements in preventive care and screening, young
adults could be at risk for sexually related health problems, Dodson
and her co-authors point out in the Journal of Pediatric and
Adolescent Gynecology.
Previous studies have shown that adolescents who feel competent,
have spirituality and are connected to their families are less
likely to start having sex early or unprotected, they write.
For the new study, the researchers defined a sense of mission or
purpose as having far-reaching goals, wanting to make a difference
in the world and making progress toward that.
The research team analyzed data from the “Growing Up Today Study,”
which followed the children of adults participating in the large,
nationwide Nurses Health Study II. Between 1996 and 2001, the kids
filled out yearly questionnaires covering topics including their
nutrition, health status, risk behaviors, body image and stressful
life events. After 2001, participants got questionnaires every other
year.
Dodson’s team analyzed responses to the 2007 survey, from 5,624
women whose average age at that time was 23.
The researchers focused on questions about how strongly the young
women felt a sense of mission, at what age they started having sex
(early was considered 15 or younger), how many sex partners they'd
had and any history of sexually transmitted infections.
Based on the responses, 28 percent of the young women had a strong
sense of mission, 55 percent had a moderate sense of mission and 17
percent had a low sense of mission. Nearly 83 percent of the women
had sex, averaging about five sexual partners.
Women with a low sense of mission were about 35 percent more likely
to report a history of sexually transmitted infections than those
with a high sense of mission and were also likely to have had higher
numbers of sex partners.
Women who went to religious services less than three times per month
were nearly three times as likely as young women with high
attendance at religious services to have started having sex at an
early age, and 33 percent more likely to have a history of sexually
transmitted infections.
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The study is based on observing these kinds of associations, at a
single point in time, and cannot prove that a high sense a sense of
mission protects young women against health problems.
The authors also acknowledge that the study population of nurses’
children was 93 percent white and not necessarily representative of
the broader population.
Britney Blair, a psychologist at Stanford University School of
Medicine in California, said the study could have a religious bias.
"When combining these particular outcome variables with the question
‘sense of mission’ in life I fear the results of the study may
reflect more of a sex-negative or religious bias than any true and
helpful finding," Blair said in an email to Reuters Health.
"The authors suggest that religious affiliation is a protective
factor against sexual risk yet make no mention of the incredibly
negative effect religion can have on a woman's sexual health," said
Blair, who was not involved in the study.
She also pointed out that the number of sex partners did not
necessarily mean risky behavior and having sexual relations at an
early age could depend on developmental maturity. Blair added that
sex education for young people is important in preventing sexual
risk.
"We do not mean to imply religious teens are healthier, but that's
just one example of being part of something greater than yourself
and feeling like you could contribute something bigger than
yourself," said Dodson, an assistant professor at Montefiore Medical
Center’s division of Adolescent Medicine in New York City.
Dodson said mentoring and other volunteering could help young
adults, and that doctors could screen for sense of mission as part
of a sexual risk assessment.
“I think it’s also a call to parents to be active in their parenting
and help foster a sense of self-worth, sense of purpose and sense of
the larger world around them,” she said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1y5c8UA Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent
Gynecology, online March 17, 2015.
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