Abstract
Sexting is the exchange of sexually suggestive contents via Internet, Smartphone, and Social Networking Websites. Recently, the research on sexting motivations increased in order to distinguish between experimental and aggravated sexting. This study investigated individual correlates of three sexting motivations: sexual purposes, instrumental/aggravated reasons, and body image reinforcement. The study involved 488 adolescents and young adults aged from 14 to 30 years. Sexual purposes and body image reinforcement were the most commonly reported motivations for sexting. Boys reported more instrumental/aggravated reasons, and sexual minorities reported more sexual purposes and body image reinforcement. Sexual purposes increased with age, while body image reinforcement showed a quadratic trend, increasing from adolescence to early young adulthood, and decreasing from early to late young adulthood. Finally, participants who have already had first sex reported more sexual purposes. Research, clinical and educational implications are discussed.
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Notes
Two-way interaction effects between age and gender, age and sexual orientation, and gender and sexual orientation, and the three-way interaction effect among age, gender and sexual orientation, were also tested with a MANOVA, but interactions were not significant.
A further MANOVA was also run for testing all possible two-way interaction effects among the independent variables (age groups, gender, sexual orientation, dating relationship status and first sex), but the interactions were not significant.
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Bianchi, D., Morelli, M., Baiocco, R. et al. Individual differences and developmental trends in sexting motivations. Curr Psychol 40, 4531–4540 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00398-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00398-4