Sexting by High School Students

In the last 8 years, several studies have documented that many adolescents acknowledge having exchanged sexually explicit cell phone pictures of themselves, a behavior termed sexting. Differences across studies in how sexting was defined, recruitment strategies, and cohort have resulted in sometimes...

Full description

Saved in:

Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Archives of sexual behavior Vol. 46; no. 6; pp. 1667 - 1672
Main Authors:	Strassberg, Donald S., Cann, Deanna, Velarde, Valerie
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	New York Springer US 01-08-2017 Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:	Adolescent Adolescent Behavior - psychology Behavioral Science and Psychology Cell Phone Female Humans Male Original Paper Psychology Public Health Schools Secondary school students Sexual Behavior Sexual Behavior - psychology Sexual Behavior - statistics & numerical data Social Sciences Students - psychology Students - statistics & numerical data Teenagers Text messaging Text Messaging - statistics & numerical data Sexting Adolescents Sexual behavior Communication
Online Access:	Get full text
Tags:	Add Tag No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!

Description
Summary:	In the last 8 years, several studies have documented that many adolescents acknowledge having exchanged sexually explicit cell phone pictures of themselves, a behavior termed sexting. Differences across studies in how sexting was defined, recruitment strategies, and cohort have resulted in sometimes significant differences in as basic a metric as what percentage of adolescents have sent, received, or forwarded such sexts . The psychosocial and even legal risks associated with sexting by minors are significantly serious that accurate estimates of its prevalence, including over time, are important to ascertain. In the present study, students ( N = 656) from a single private high school were surveyed regarding their participation in sexting. Students at this same school were similarly surveyed four years earlier. In this second survey, reported rates of sending (males 15.8%; females 13.6%) and receiving (males 40.5%; females 30.6%) sexually explicit cell phone pictures (revealing genitals or buttocks of either sex or female breasts) were generally similar to those reported at the same school 4 years earlier. Rates of forwarding sexts (males 12.2%; females 7.6%) were much lower than those previously acknowledged at this school. Correlates of sexting in this study were similar to those reported previously. Overall, our findings suggest that sexting by adolescents (with the exception of forwarding) remains a fairly common behavior, despite its risks.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23
ISSN:	0004-0002 1573-2800
DOI:	10.1007/s10508-016-0926-9