Social cognitive processes mediating the relationship between exposure to television's sexual content and adolescents' sexual behavior by Steven C. Martino, Rebecca L. Collins, David E. Kanouse, Marc Elliot, and Sandra H. Berry

Résumé du document

The article I chose to study is from the volume 89 of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published in 2005 by the American Psychological Association. It deals with a research supported by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. I chose this one since, like the article that I chose for my oral presentation, it tries to explain the influence of exposure to television's sexual content on adolescents' sexual behavior. Indeed, it's a subject which interests me because teenagers spend a lot of time in front of TV and I wonder what effects it produces on their behavior. I will focus on the sexual content since I noticed that several American programs intended for adolescents to deal with sex as a game. For instance, in One Tree Hill, the adolescent characters never talk about condoms, as a result that all the women wonder if they are pregnant! It shows that they don't use any protection, so I think that teenagers who see regularly this kind of experience on TV may take it in model, and the consequences may be terrible (risk of having an unplanned pregnancy and acquiring a sexually transmitted disease (STD)).

Extraits

[...] Indeed, studies show that adolescents who watch more TV violence report more aggressive behaviors, so it would be the same process for sexual content. The goal of this longitudinal study is to test a theoretical model explaining the relationship between exposure to sexual content on TV and the initiation of intercourse among adolescents. For this, the authors proceeded on two times. In a first time, they created a model based on social-cognitive theory which proposes 3 variables that may mediate the relationship between exposure to TV's sexual content and adolescents' behaviors: 1 - Perceived peer norms about sex. [...]

[...] They found that several variables were associated with higher levels of sexual experience: a frequent viewing of music videos and talk shows (which are programs with high levels of sexual content) and the identification with popular characters. Moreover, they demonstrated that the exposure to the sexual stereotype on TV that women are sex objects causes an acceptance of it by the adolescent viewers. So, not only exposure to sexual content on TV hastens the initiation of intercourse, but also it leaves an impression on adolescents: adolescents' sexual activities may be guided by sexual stereotypes transmitted by the media. [...]

[...] (1998) found that youth who perceived a higher prevalence of sexual initiation among their peers were more likely to initiate sexual intercourse the next year. So perceived prosex norms are positively related to adolescents' future sexual behaviors. 2 - Safe-sex self-efficacy. Perceived self-efficacy is defined as a judgment of one's ability to perform given types of behavior. Bandura (1977) shows that it influences the behaviors individuals choose to enact and how much effort they direct toward executing those behaviors. Several studies have shown that safe-sex self-efficacy (i.e. [...]

[...] So this first hypothesis is validated since a greater exposure to TV sexual content predicted higher estimates by participants of the prevalence of sexual initiation among their friends. For the second hypothesis: Exposure to sexual content on TV positively predicted safe-sex self-efficacy among African American and white youth, but not among Hispanic youth. The African American and white adolescents who frequently watched people talking about sex on TV were more confident that they could enact safe sexual behaviors (like obtaining condoms for example) than were adolescents with less exposure to sexual content on TV. [...]

[...] A greater exposure to sexual content on TV would lead to less negative expectancies regarding the consequences of sexual intercourse. These 3 hypotheses lead to a fourth hypothesis (the second time of the research): these 3 variables (prosex norms, safe-sex self-efficacy, and decreased negative outcome expectancies regarding sex) are expected to predict an increased likelihood of first intercourse in the subsequent year. To test the 3 first hypotheses, they combined interview data with measures of TV sexual content (from the participants' TV viewing habits over the six months before the research) among an ethnically diverse national sample of 1,292 adolescent girls and boys. [...]