Sexting
Relationship between Sexting and Self-Esteem, Depression, Anxiety, and Stress among Young People.
Open Access: No.
Abstract
Introduction: The huge spread of the internet and especially of social media has led to new ways of communication, even erotic communication, especially among young people, replacing, in many cases, activities that until now required the face-to-face meeting of individuals.
Aim: To investigate the relationship between sexting and self-esteem, depression, anxiety, and stress among young people. Also, we investigated the impact of demographic characteristics on sexting.
Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted with 368 young people aged 18-30 years old. We created an anonymous form of the study questionnaire with Google forms and we disseminated it through social media. Thus, we obtained a convenience sample. We used valid scales to measure sexting, self-esteem, depression, anxiety and stress among young people. All scales in our study had very good Cronbach’s alpha.
Results: Mean age of the participants was 23.7 years, while 82.3% was females. Mean every day time that participants spent on social media/platforms/applications was 4.7 hours. Participants used more often to communicate with others Instagram (86.8%) and Facebook (62.8%), and then Viber (29.9%), TikTok (9.8%), Snapchat (6%) and WhatsApp (5.1%). Frequency of texting was low among participants, while self-esteem level was average. Moreover, participants had higher levels of stress than depression and anxiety. We found that increased sexting was associated with decreased self-esteem (r=-0.3, p=0.02), increased depression (r=0.4, p=0.001), increased anxiety (r=0.3, p=0.005), and increased stress (r=0.4, p<0.001). Multivariable linear regression analysis identified that increased number of accounts on social media/platforms/applications (coefficient beta=0.07, 95% confidence interval=0.01 to 0.13, p-value=0.023) and increased age (coefficient beta=0.08, 95% confidence interval=0.01 to 0.13, p-value=0.003) was associated with increased sexting.
Conclusions: Understanding the relationship between sexting and self-esteem, depression, anxiety, and stress in young people will give policy makers the opportunity to develop appropriate health education programmes to reduce risky sexual behaviors.
Relevance
“We found that lower self-esteem was associated with an increased frequency of sexting among young people…In addition, we found that increased depression, anxiety and stress in young people were associated with increased frequency of sexting.”
Citation
Galanis, P., Katsiroumpa, Z., Katsiroumpa, A., Tsakalaki, A., & Vasilopoulos, S. (2023). Relationship between Sexting and Self-Esteem, Depression, Anxiety, and Stress among Young People. International Journal of Caring Sciences, 36(1), 62-71. https://www.internationaljournalofcaringsciences.org/docs/6.galanis.pdf
