Sexting in college students: behaviors and motivations considering couple’s situation

Abstract

In the last decade, sexting has emerged as an increasingly common practice in the expression of sexuality, especially among adolescence and youth. Progressively, this trend has become significantly integrated into people’s social and romantic interactions, regardless of whether they’re in a stable relationship or not, leading to both opportunities and challenges, as well as risks, in terms of privacy, consent and health. The aim of the study was to analyse differences in sexting behaviors and motivations based on couple’s situation. To do this, 200 college students (72% female), aged between 19 and 30 years (M = 21.64, DT = 3.27), completed a battery of online questions about their affective-sexual history and several questionnaires about sexting. Among the results, it’s worth noting that people who had a stable relationship received more sexual content (x² = 6.31; p = .012), sent more (x² = 11.97; p = .001) and received more responses to the content they had sent (x² =9.68; p = .002). Considering the reasons for sexting, statistically significant differences were found in doing it out of boredom (x² = 3.88; p = .049), due to feelings of loneliness (x² = 7.91; p = .005) and not knowing what they were doing because of something they had drunk (x² = 6.62; p = .010), with these motivations being more common among people without stable partner. In conclusion, the results show the high prevalence of this new way of sexual communication and highlight the importance of considering relational status when establishing prevention and/or health promotion programs that address the emerging phenomenon of sexting, particularly to encourage other motivations that promote a healthier sexuality. This work has been made possible thanks to the UJI-B2021-13 grant provided by the University Jaume I de Castellon.