Adolescent health brief
An Evaluation of the Distribution of Sexual References Among “Top 8” MySpace Friends

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Abstract

To evaluate whether online friends of adolescents who display sexual references on a social networking site also display references. The method used was content analysis. The result of this study was that adolescents who displayed explicit sexual references were more likely to have online friends who displayed references. Thus, social networking sites present new opportunities to investigate adolescent sexual behavior.

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Study setting

This observational study applied content analysis to publicly available MySpace profiles between June and August 2008, and received Institutional Review Board exemptions from the University of Washington and University of Wisconsin.

Subjects

Our first goal was to identify a group of 20 MySpace profiles: 10 profiles without sexual references (nondisplayers) and 10 profiles with sexual references (displayers) (n = 20). Inclusion criteria for these 20 profiles consisted of the following: publicly available

Initial 20 profiles

Of our 20 subjects' profiles, 11 profile owners were female (55%). Among displayers, nine were female (90%), and among nondisplayers, two were female (20%) (χ2 = 9.8, p = .001). The majority of profile owners were White/Caucasian (59%); there were no significant differences in race/ethnicity between nondisplayers and displayers (Table 1).

Top 8 friends' profiles

Of our 160 “Top 8” friend profiles, only 63 profile owners reported gender (35%); of these, 24 were female (38%). Of the profiles that included data, there

Conclusion

Sexual references were evenly distributed among friends' profiles linked to both displayers and nondisplayers, perhaps representative of adolescents' normal developmental curiosity about sex expressed on SNSs. This finding is supported by previous studies illustrating that sexual references are common on adolescents' SNS profiles [1], [3]. However, when references were limited to explicit sexual references, adolescents displayed these references in patterns similar to their online peers. This

Acknowledgment

This project was supported by Award Number K12HD055894 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development or the National Institutes of Health. We would like to acknowledge Marlon Mundt, PhD and Katie Egan for their assistance with this manuscript.

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Copyright © 2010 Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.