Attitudes toward nonmarital sex in 24 countries

Abstract

Attitudes toward premarital sex, teenage sex, extramarital sex, and homosexual sex in 24 countries were compared. Challenging the simplistic notion that a permissive‐nonpermissive dichotomy is sufficient to describe variations across countries, the hypothesis that there are distinctive sexual regimes with different moral standards depending on the type of sexuality was examined. Cluster analysis reveals that there are six groupings of nations which have similar moral standards. However, a variance decomposition analysis also shows that all countries included in the sample share relatively similar attitudes toward nonmarital sex.