Anu Srivastava*
Department of Education, Government Women’s College, Gardanibagh, Patna, Bihar, India
Received : 23rd April, 2020 ; Revised : 21st May, 2020
Abstract–Attitudes, an aspect of personality, are formed and changed in accordance with the characteristics of the societies, groups and cultures. Social attitudes are characterized by consistency in response to social objects. It determines the response of the individuals towards different social, national and international problems. The emerging sexuality that accompanies adolescence poses fundamental challenges for young people. These include adjusting to the altered appearance and functioning of a sexually maturing body, learning to deal with sexual desires, confronting sexual attitudes and values, experimenting with sexual behaviors, and integrating these feelings, attitudes, and experiences into a developing sense of self. Adolescents’ responses to these challenges are profoundly influenced by the social and cultural context in which they live. Modern youngsters live in an era of sex revolution. Since last three decades there has been a paradigm shift in the sexual behavior and responses of the college girls. They have acquired more open attitudes towards the sex related issues. In the present study, the restrictive and permissive attitudes of college girls towards sexual behaviour have been envisaged in five different Girls colleges in Patna. The residential area, size of the family and income level and peers have been formed as independent variables. With the objective of investigating into the effects of family income level on attitudes towards permissive and restrictive sexual behavior the standardized Sex behavior Attitude inventory (Yashwir, 1977) and one self-made questionnaire seeking personal information were applied to a sample of 200 subjects of proposed five different Girls colleges of Patna. Following this rationale, the scores in different criteria were calculated separately. Means and S.Ds of the attitude area were calculated for both groups and their sub groups. After this, t-test was applied to know the significance of the difference between mean scores of the group and sub-groups. The value at P<0.01 were considered significant. It was observed that attitudes towards permissive sexual behaviour were higher in the subjects of married higher income group than in contrast to married middle and lower income group.The findings of the present study highlight a significant correlation amongst the attitudes of sexual behavior of adolescent girls and the family income level.
