Michel Walrave

The associations between adolescents' consumption of pornography and music videos and their sexting behavior

Several scholars have argued that adolescents sexting behavior might be influenced by their media use. However, to date, empirical evidence of the link between media socialization and engagement in sexting behavior remains scarce. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether music video and pornography consumption are able to predict a range of sexting behaviors among a sample of 329 adolescents with a mean age of 16.71 years (SD=0.74). The results demonstrate that sexting behaviors were significantly associated with the consumption of pornography, when controlling for age, gender, school track, and Internet use. Taking into account the gender of the adolescents, the significant relationship between engagement in the four types of sexting behavior and pornography use held true for both boys and girls. Music video consumption was only significantly associated with asking someone for a sexting message and having received a sexting message. Further analyses revealed that these significant relationships only held for boys.