A metasynthesis of qualitative studies on casual sexual relationships and experiences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most studies on casual sexual relationships and experiences (CSREs) are quantitative and focus on characteristics of individuals who experience them. There has been an increase in qualitative research on CSREs that have revealed new insights into how they are experienced among young adults. To synthesize qualitative knowledge on how CSREs are experienced, a qualitative metasynthesis was carried out using 13 studies published up to June, 2015, yielding seven conceptual categories. Opportunities and choices regarding CSREs were organized according to biographical context, socioenvironmental context, and peer norms. Expectations of CSREs related to lack of communication, emotional, and sexual commitment or accountability. Implicit rules allowed maintaining boundaries between sex and emotion. Thus, CSREs can satisfy various needs related to sex and intimacy. Sex in CSREs was reported as pleasure-centred, accessible, and improved when experienced in association with intimacy. However, intimacy and gender roles interfered with condom use. The sexual double standard and gender roles limited women's agency and enjoyment of sex. Expectations for the lack of intimacy and communication conflicted with developing unrequited feelings, resulting in self-blame and attempts to suppress emotions. While partners may have a hard time defining their relationship over time, some CSREs involved developing friendships or romance, and ruining friendships. The results indicate a clash between expectations, rules, and experiences of CSREs. The lack of symbolic markers for the meaning or status of CSREs as they develop can be seen as a consequence of the complexity of these relationships.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".