Can Social Media Photos Influence College Students’ Sexual Health Behaviors?

Abstract

Beth, a 20-year-old transfer student to South Oregon University, logs on to Facebook on a Friday afternoon in the second week of classes. Her previous school, Chesapearo Community College, was well-known for its wild parties. Chesapearo students’ Facebook photos, teeming with alcohol and sexually suggestive poses, reflected the school’s stereotypes and reputation as a hotbed for sexual promiscuity and unintended pregnancy. However, while browsing the South Oregon University Facebook network, Beth notices that students at her new campus don’t showcase photos of themselves drunk and provocatively posed. Instead, most of the pictures show students sitting in dorm rooms talking with friends, or spending time with their families. This makes Beth rethink her plans for the party she’s attending in the evening. Maybe instead of donning a short skirt and “pre-partying” with several shots of liquor, she’d fit in better at her new campus if she arrived at the party sober and wore more conservative clothing. She decides that she won’t make sexual conquest a goal for the evening. She puts on her jeans to hang out with her new girlfriends and grabs a condom so that just in case something does happen with a boy, she’ll be ready for it. Can social media sites such as Facebook affect college students’ sexual health behaviors? Could Facebook photos, for example, make a person reconsider his or her intention to have sex or use a condom? In this chapter we address this question empirically and test the prediction that viewing Facebook photos can act as an intervention that increases college students’ intentions to use condoms—at least at schools where the actual prevalence of sexual promiscuity is not as high as students might imagine.