AD ALTA
JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
interactions of a child with the rest of the system (Jonsson, L. S.,
2015).
In the next section, we took a number of foreign research
findings into consideration and framed our own research goals.
Although the issue of sexting predictors is examined and
investigated abroad, it falls far below the other sexting
researches. As for Slovakia, the systematic researches on this
issue are likewise rather rare. We thus tried to explore one of the
crucial determinants affecting the frequency and incidence of the
adolescent sexting and identify its impacts on this at-risk
phenomenon. Family structure and environment, as well as the
quality of family relationships are all essential factors that
influence sexting occurrence.
The main goal was to look into the structure of the adolescents’
family environment, investigate the quality of their relationships
with parents and analyze the subsequent differences of pursuing
self- and peer-sexting behavior.
We wanted to find out what impact the family structure and
quality of relationships with parents had on:
self-sexting, i.e. online presentation of one's own sexuality
via submission of the intimate material
peer-sexting, i.e. submission of classmates’/friends’ sexual
or sexually explicit materials and requesting them for one’s
own account
2
Methods
Our research involved 790 adolescent respondents aged 12 – 18.
The research sample consisted of 376 boys (47.6%) and
414 girls (52.4%). This selection is based on the applied
stratified sampling strategy.
The results were obtained from the distributed custom
questionnaire. The reliability of this research instrument was
verified on the basis of Cronbach's alpha statistical analysis. Our
questionnaire contained factual inputs and questions to help us
explore the individual predictors of adolescent sexting. For
individual scales, the research instrument reliability ranged from
very good (0.936) to questionable (0.681). Distributed
questionnaire embraced multiple interrelated problems. Given
the subject matter of this research study, we only present results
associated with the differences in adolescent sexting frequency
that arise from particular typology of family environment and
relationships. Adolescent sexting frequency was evaluated on the
scale of 5 points: 1 – never, 2 – once, 3 – twice, 4 – multiple
times, 1 – every day. ANOVA test was used as a test criterion to
determine the statistical significance level of p=0.05.
3 Results
This section includes the above-mentioned results related to the
differences in adolescent sexting frequency based on specific
structure of family environment. Important findings were
achieved for both self- and peer-sexting questions and their
subsequent answers. Table 1 shows the data acquired from the
investigation of self-sexting as sending and publishing
sexual/sexually explicit photos of the adolescent. The achieved
statistical significance of p=0.016 suggests that the frequency of
forwarding one’s own intimate photo at least once a month is
higher for the adolescents who live in a less stable family
environment and structure (e.g. joint custody, single-parent or
reconstructed family). It further indicates that the stability of
family environment is a protective factor that lowers sexting
frequency. Considering the structure of family environment, it is
interesting, yet not surprising, that posting/publishing one's own
intimate material online is not statistically significant. This fact
is rather reasonable as we know that social networks include
profiles of respondents’ friends, teachers, educators, parents and
other acquaintances. As a result, pubescent children and
adolescents do not share or post their intimate photos on the
Internet. As opposed to the private romantic or serious
relationships and friendships, the previous research (Hollá, K.,
2017) showed that the adolescents were more careful with public
presentation of their intimate photos or videos.
Table 1. Impact of different family structures on self-sexting
no.1
Sending
sexts
Family
structure
N
AM
SD
SEM
df
F
p
Sending
nude photos
two-parent
family
510
1.34
0.832
0.037
4
3.057
0.016
two-gener.
family
79
1.14
0.525
0.059
single
parent
126
1.46
1.086
0.097
joint custody
28
1.71
1.301
0.246
reconstr.
family
47
1.47
0.929
0.136
posting
one’s own
photo online
two-parent
family
510
1.05
0.343
0.015
4
2.180
0.070
two-gener.
family
79
1.05
0.316
0.036
single
parent
126
1.15
0.608
0.054
joint custody
28
1.14
0.591
0.112
reconstr.
family
47
1.15
0.510
0.074
Explanatory notes: N – number; AM – arithmetic mean; SD –
standard deviation; SEM – standard error of mean, F – test
criterion; df – degrees of freedom; p – statistical significance
level
Peer-sexting is defined as sending and circulating the intimate
materials among peers. In Table 2, the achieved statistical
significance of p=0.005 suggests the adolescents who live in a
joint custody forwarded the nude photo of a classmate/friend or
another person more often. The statistical significance of
p=0.004 further implies that the frequency of requesting such
intimate materials was also higher for this group. According to
the research results, children raised in a joint custody sent their
classmate’s (AM=1.79), friend’s or someone else’s (AM=1.71)
intimate material and requested it (AM=1.71) more often that
children who are raised by two-parent or multi-generation
families.
The adolescents from single-parent family (AM=1.44) also
admitted to send the sexual photo of another person more often
that respondents from two-parent (AM=1.15), multi-generation
(AM=1.13) and reconstructed (AM=1.23) families. Worth to
mention is this group’s statistical significance of forwarding the
intimate photos of familiar person. It turned out that children
raised by one parent were more inclined to forward the intimate
photos than children from the other types of family.
We can thus assume that two-parent, multi-generation and
reconstructed families create the environment of higher parental
control and better mutual communication between parents and
their children. The adolescents raised in such families tend to
give a different online self-presentation than those living in
single-parent families or joint custody.
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