Study on Human Sexuality Attitudes in Hispanic Males and Females

Evolution is the unifying theory in biology. Evolution has also come to be very important for the field of psychology, and may possibly be the number one theory today in psychology, having gained much recent popularity in the field. In the present study, we are interested in the sexual attitudes of male and female Hispanic college students at a university near the Mexican border. We use the term “Hispanic” because that is the most popular term used here. In other parts of the United States, “Latino” is considered more acceptable and “Hispanic” may even be seen as unacceptable. The survey was distributed in three Psychology courses, taught by their researcher instructors, who read out loud the consent paragraph at the top of the survey to all the students before letting them read it to themselves. Sexual attitudes were studied in 130 university students, at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, a Hispanic-serving university in the Rio Grande Valley, in Texas, near the Mexican border. Males and females rated their level of agreement to 38 items on a 1-to-5 scale, in a revision of a previously used sexual attitudes scale. For the most part, these students agreed with one another, but there were some important differences, with males being more permissive than females on some items. The direction of the results showed that among our Hispanic sample, both men and women condemned partner unfaithfulness, whether it involved sexual intercourse or commitment to another. Again, this does not support Buss, who would have predicted that women, more than men, condemn the partner’s emotional investment in another, but men are more worried than women by the partner having sexual intercourse with another.