In a study examining the principal drivers of sexting, researcher found friends and romantic partners to be the main source of social pressure related to sexting among adolescents.
According to statistics, over 20 percent of adolescents and 44 percent young adults indulge in "sexting", the act of sending nude or semi-nude pictures of themselves over the cell phone or social networking sites. In order to examine the principal drivers of this activity, researchers conducted a study and were surprised by their findings.
Friends and romantic partners were found to be the main source of social sexting pressure among adolescents and this was even greater than an adolescent's own attitude towards the whole activity, according to a press release.
The study was conducted on 498 adolescents aged between 15 and 18 years. The research also revealed that adolescents indulged in sexting to get more attention, lower their chances of catching STDs and to find romantic partners. The fear of getting a bad reputation or having someone blackmail them later didn't dampen their motivation to sex-text. Pressure from parents to avoid such activities too wasn't threatening enough to keep them from sexting their romantic partners.
"Remarkably, only the behavioral beliefs that expected positive outcomes of sexting were significant in predicting adolescents' willingness to engage in it," authors of the study noted. "The more positive the perceived social pressure that originates from these two categories of referents -- who mostly belong to the peer group -- the more adolescents will be inclined to engage in sexting."
Researchers also noted that adolescents were more likely to "sext" if they trusted the recipient a hundred percent. Also, the more pressure they faced from romantic partners, the more likely were they to sext frequently. Girls were found to have a more negative response to sext than boys.
"Rather than adapting their motivations to sext to their own subjective evaluations, adolescents are influenced relatively more by the social pressure that they anticipate receiving from significant others," the researchers said. "Our results suggest that in order to reduce sexting among adolescents, preventive initiatives should allude to what significant others in teenagers' lives think about them engaging in sexting."
