Timing Patterns in the Development of Sexual Intimacy: An Attitudinal Report on Three Modern Western Societies.

The present paper is the last in a series of three, all of which deal with premarital sexual intimacy compared cross-culturally. The cultures involved are an Intermountain area of the United States, which is predominantly Mormon and is relatively conservative or restrictive in its sexual outlook; a Midwestern section of the United States, which may be regarded as somewhat typical of the country as a whole; and Denmark, which, like the rest of Scandinavia, is relatively liberal or permissive in its sex norms. The two previous reports, by means of several statistical measures, demonstrated the sexual restrictiveness of the Intermountain culture and the sexual permissiveness of the Danish culture, as was originally hypothesized. Questionnaires were carefully constructed, translated into Danish, pretested several times on both sides of the Atlantic, revised on the basis of the pretests, and then administered during the spring of 1958 to classes in three universities selected from the three cultures under study.