Early first sexual intercourse has been proposed as an important marker of later sexual and reproductive health. Discussions of what constitutes early sexual debut in this context, however, have been limited.
This paper presents findings from a systematic review of the literature before further exploring common definitions of early first sexual intercourse using data from a population-based study of Australian men and women.
The systematic review of the literature found definitions of early first sexual intercourse have been conceptualised in a number of different ways. Some have used age at first sexual intercourse as a continuous variable while others have taken the ages given by respondents and categorised them. Overall, those who elected to categorise early first sexual intercourse tended to follow one of two methods; choose an age to separate those who had sex early first from those who did not (for example, <16 years), or secondly allocate a proportion of the sample as early, this was done separately for different subgroups (for example, the earliest 25% of each generation). Next, these definitions will be further explored using data from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Health and Relationships.
The lack of standardisation in what constitutes early first sexual intercourse makes it very difficult to compare the findings of one study with another. To the best of our knowledge, our investigations will be the first to critically examine definitions of early first sexual intercourse in the context of later sexual and reproductive outcomes.
