BACKGROUND
Sexual development is a complex process, the study of which should consider not only first sexual intercourse but also multiple behavioural trajectories in a comprehensive perspective. Moreover, first romantic relationships and sexual experimentation during adolescence form the building blocks for subsequent more mature relationships and sexual behaviours later in life.

OBJECTIVE
This study focuses on young Italians’ first romantic and sexual experiences, with a twofold aim. We seek to both describe the trajectories characterising the first stages of youths’ affective and sexual development and to study the differences among them by gender and birth cohort.

METHODS
Applying sequence analysis and subsequent cluster analysis to a sample taken from two surveys conducted in 2000–2001 and 2017 on Italian university students, we identify young people’s affective and sexual development trajectories. This is followed by a multinomial logistic regression analysis to discern the effect of gender and birth cohort on the probability of belonging to a given pathway.

RESULTS
We identify six distinct sexual ideal types among young men and women, with gender differences that characterise the trajectories of affective and sexual development of most university students. That said, our results also suggest that differences between the two genders have narrowed over time.



中文翻译：

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年轻意大利人进入性生活的不同途径：与性别和出生队列的关联（Valentina Tocchioni、Marcantonio Caltabiano、Silvia Meggiolaro）

背景
技术性发展是一个复杂的过程，对其研究不仅要考虑第一次性交，还要综合考虑多种行为轨迹。此外，青春期的第一次浪漫关系和性实验构成了以后更成熟的关系和性行为的基石。

目的
本研究侧重于意大利年轻人的第一次浪漫和性经历，具有双重目的。我们试图描述表征青少年情感和性发展第一阶段的轨迹，并研究它们之间的性别和出生队列差异。

方法
将序列分析和随后的聚类分析应用于 2000-2001 年和 2017 年对意大利大学生进行的两次调查的样本，我们确定了年轻人的情感和性发展轨迹。随后进行多项逻辑回归分析，以辨别性别和出生队列对属于给定途径的概率的影响。

结果
我们在青年男女中确定了六种不同的性理想类型，性别差异是大多数大学生情感和性发展轨迹的特征。也就是说，我们的结果还表明，随着时间的推移，两种性别之间的差异已经缩小。