Hooking Up: Attitudes, Perceptions, and Practices Among First Generation College Students

On college campuses, hooking up has become a common practice among college students. Literature has shown that hooking up is a term that is loosely used on college campuses to describe the intimate interactions among students. Hooking up can include anything from kissing to sexual intercourse or anything falling in between the two extremes, demonstrating the vagueness and broadness of the term. College students use the term hookup to generally refer to a man and woman pairing off at the end of a party or evening at a bar to engage in a physical/sexual encounter. Partners have a casual sexual encounter with no expectation of establishing a committed relationship. With hooking up, the level of commitment and interest found in the sexual intimacy with the partner is not equivalent to the level of commitment to the relationship. A hook up may involve intimate sexual encounters but there is no ongoing romantic relationships formed between the partners. While students are not to expect a romantic relationship to develop from a hookup, for some couples, a relationship develops from exactly that. Hooking up has become a new pathway among college students to form committed relationships