The results also showed that African American girls were at higher risk than European American girls for engaging in risky sex at age 16 after controlling for household poverty, conduct problems, impulsivity and early menarche. Furthermore, this association was not explained by emerging patterns of alcohol use. Thus, in the current sample, alcohol acted as a differential risk mechanism for girls of African and European American race, and this is consistent with prior studies that have reported little covariation between sexual risk-taking and alcohol use among African American adolescents (e.g., Stanton et al. 1993). In fact, the variables included in the current analyses did not explain the disparity in sexual risk-taking across these racial groups. These results add to the growing contention that contextual factors (e.g., structure of sexual contact networks, negative attitudes towards contraception, neighborhood disadvantage) might better account for racial/ethnic disparities in HIV and STI risk than individual-level determinants (Adimora and Schoenbach 2005; Fichtenberg et al. 2009; Lightfoot and Milburn 2009; Thorburn and Bogart 2005). Identifying contextually sensitive mechanisms of sexual risk-taking is clearly an important avenue for future research and tailored prevention programming.
