The article I chose to study is from the volume 89 of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published in 2005 by the American Psychological Association. It deals with a research supported by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. I chose this one since, like the article that I chose for my oral presentation, it tries to explain the influence of exposure to television's sexual content on adolescents' sexual behavior. Indeed, it's a subject which interests me because teenagers spend a lot of time in front of TV and I wonder what effects it produces on their behavior. I will focus on the sexual content since I noticed that several American programs intended for adolescents to deal with sex as a game. For instance, in One Tree Hill, the adolescent characters never talk about condoms, as a result that all the women wonder if they are pregnant! It shows that they don't use any protection, so I think that teenagers who see regularly this kind of experience on TV may take it in model, and the consequences may be terrible (risk of having an unplanned pregnancy and acquiring a sexually transmitted disease (STD)).
[...] Indeed, studies show that adolescents who watch more TV violence report more aggressive behaviors, so it would be the same process for sexual content. The goal of this longitudinal study is to test a theoretical model explaining the relationship between exposure to sexual content on TV and the initiation of intercourse among adolescents. For this, the authors proceeded on two times. In a first time, they created a model based on social-cognitive theory which proposes 3 variables that may mediate the relationship between exposure to TV's sexual content and adolescents' behaviors: 1 - Perceived peer norms about sex. [...]
[...] So they had 3 hypotheses which are linked in the schema below: A greater exposure to televised sexual content would lead to increased estimates of the percentage of one's friends who are sexually active (they focused on friends norms because they are among the most influential social models during adolescence). A greater exposure to TV's sexual content would predict higher scores on the measure of safe-sex self-efficacy (they wanted to measure the general concept of sexual self-efficacy which reflects participants' confidence in their ability to enact behaviors related to sex, but they could not so they made the assumption that safe-sex self-efficacy should be highly related to the broader concept of sexual self-efficacy). [...]
[...] To conclude, I want to make a link with the article I studied for my oral presentation which is: Using TV as a guide: associations between television viewing and adolescents' sexual attitudes and behavior by Monique Ward and Kimberly Friedman, published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence in 2006. These authors wanted to examine associations between adolescents' regular TV use and their sexual behavior. They found that several variables were associated with higher levels of sexual experience: a frequent viewing of music videos and talk [...]
[...] Bandura (1977) shows that it influences the behaviors individuals choose to enact and how much effort they direct toward executing those behaviors. Several studies have shown that safe-sex self-efficacy (i.e. the degree to which adolescents feel able to discuss sexually sensitive topics with a potential partner) is an important predictor of adolescents' sexual behavior. Indeed, Taris and Semin (1998) have demonstrated that it was associated with increased levels of sexual experience among adolescents aged 15 to 18 years old. 3 - Negative outcome expectancies. [...]
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