Abstract
Despite the growing body of research regarding sexting and online sexual victimization, there is little evidence exploring cultural differences in association with those behaviors. The aim of this study was to examine cultural differences in sexting practices by comparing an American sample and a Spanish sample of university students. The original sample was composed of 1799 college students, including 1386 Spanish college students and 413 American Students, with 74% of female participants, and ages ranging from 18 to 64 years old (mean age = 21.26, SD= 4.61). Results indicate that American students sext more than Spanish students and have higher probabilities of being victims of nonconsensual dissemination of their sexual content. However, Spanish students receive more sexts than American students. Although our results show differences between the Spanish and the American samples that might be modulated by cultural factors, the vulnerability of females regarding sexting remains unchanged. Additionally, differences in specific characteristics of the behaviors (such as perceived risk, receiver of the sexual content, intensity of the sexual content, and motive for sexting) were also studied. Further results and implications are discussed in relation to cultural differences.
Highlights
Research on sexting has been increasingly growing over the past few years
Our results show that American women from our sample were 7.05 times more likely to be victims of nonconsensual dissemination of their sexual content than Spanish women (18.9% vs. 3.2%; p = 0.000)
When comparing male and female participants within nationality samples, for the Spanish sample results only showed significant differences between men and women for secondary sexting (χ2 (1, n = 1357) = 4.23, p = 0.040, OR = 1.30 95% CI [1.01, 1.66]), whilst significant differences between males and females for the American sample were found for being a victim of nonconsensual dissemination of sexting (χ2 (1, n = 413) = 15.20, p = 0.000, OR = 7.62 95% CI [2.33, 24.87])
Summary
According to Agustina [1], the exchange of sexual messages has existed throughout history, new technologies have facilitated the exchange of images and videos, which are undoubtedly more explicit and might have a stronger impact both on the sender and on the receiver. This exchange of erotic or sexual content has become to be known as sexting, a term first used in 2005 by the Sunday Telegraph, which unified the terms “sex” and “texting”, and tried to describe a new and incipient phenomenon where people were exchanging text messages with erotic or sexual content. Benotsch et al [8] surveyed 763 undergraduate students and their results indicated that 44% of the sample had either sent or received a sext, while Dir et al [9] reported that 46.6% had sent a sexual picture and 64.2% had
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