Prevalence of sexting in Young University students: Motivation and perception of risk

Abstract

Sexting is a phenomenon on the rise among adolescents and young adults that consists of sending messages and/or files of a sexual nature through smartphones and social networks. Although there is no clear consensus in its conceptualization, bad management of sexting can lead to a number of risks such as cyberbullying or sextortion. Sexting is a key phenomenon when designing sex education programs in young adults. The present study aims to find out the degree of prevalence of sexting in the young adult university population. To this end, a series of instruments were administered to 288 students between 18 and 25 years of the University of Valencia, from the university degrees in Pedagogy, Teacher in Early Childhood Education and Teacher in Primary Education. The results indicate that sexting is a rare practice in the day to day of young adults, although 39.2% declare that they have practiced it on occasion. In turn, they point out how moral assessment and risk perception are two factors related to the frequency of sexting. Those subjects who make a negative moral assessment are less likely to perform sexting and more likely to value such practice as risky. On the other hand, we found another series of results that support the contributions of scientific literature, such as the difference between men and women with respect to frequency or greater frequency in non-heterosexual subjects with respect to heterosexual subjects.