Laura Sessions Stepp, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose reporting on teenage sex and “hookup” culture on college campuses explored in strikingly intimate detail how adolescent girls and young women think about relationships, love and bodily autonomy, died on Feb. 24 in Springfield, Va. She was 73.

Her husband, Carl Sessions Stepp, said the cause of her death, at a memory-care facility, was from complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

In a series of articles for The Washington Post, and later for her best-selling book,66jogo “Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both” (2007), Ms. Sessions Stepp immersed herself in the lives of her subjects in the Washington area and at several colleges — going to parties, hanging out in dorms and tagging along on trips to the mall.

Image“Unhooked” was a best seller, but it was also criticized as prudish and alarmist.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

She earned their trust with a soothing voice accented by her Arkansas roots. But most of all, she listened.

“She wasn’t judgmental,” Henry Allen, her editor in The Post’s Style section, said in an interview. “These girls would tell her these amazing things.”

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