Timing of Sexual Debut and Initiation of Postsecondary Education by Early Adulthood

neglect (signifying that basic needs, such as food or clothing were not taken care of) and sexual abuse (respondents were asked if they had been touched or been forced to touch a parent or caretaker in a sexual manner or if their parent or caretaker had forced them to have sexual relations). Analyses Our analyses are limited to respondents who participated in Waves 1 and 3, and had longitudinal sample weights available; had not experienced sexual intercourse and were younger than 16 at Wave 1; and had complete data on debut timing, postsecondary initiation and all covariates of interest. Our final sample consisted of 3,965 respondents. Limitation to those who had not yet experienced sexual debut byWave 1 was necessary to control for predebut characteristics, and to adequately address the temporal ordering of educational aspirations and sexual debut. Age limitations were necessary to ensure that all included participants had the opportunity to be part of anyof the threedebut timing groups (early, typical, late). All analyses were conducted in Stata version 9, with variance corrections for clustering at the school level and weighted to yield nationally representative estimates. Weighted proportions were run to describe the sample’s personal, family and neighborhood characteristics. Chisquare analyses and analyses of variance were performed to test associations between control variables and both timing of sexual debut and initiation of postsecondary education. Finally, the relevance of sexual debut timing for postsecondary initiation was tested with two multivariable Poisson regression models, run separately by gender.* The first model was fit to estimate the crude relationship between sexual debut timing and postsecondary education initiation. The second included all control variables, the main independent variable, and the interaction of race and debut timing. Our hypotheses testing was conducted with alpha set at .05, except for interaction terms, where it was set at .15. In preliminary analyses, interactions between debut timing and race or ethnicity were insignificant for both males (p=0.9) and females (p=0.2), indicating no significant racial or ethnic differences in the relationship between sexual debut timing and early adult postsecondary education initiation. Therefore, multivariable models were subsequently fit without these interaction terms. Risk ratios for postsecondary education initiation were calculated by exponentiating the estimated regression coefficients.