Technology has expanded the availability of information through various routes, such as, television, music, movies, internet and magazines. These routes avail adolescents to endless learning venues about any issue that might be of interest to them. Television is a common media mode and research indicates approximately 83% of programming contains sexual content. Adolescents being impressionable believe the sexual content in the media is natural, which may lead to an altered perception of what types of behaviors are appropriate for them.
This retrospective descriptive study explored whether mass media prompted individuals to become sexually active as adolescents. The sample population of 180 college age students came from a public university in the southeast United States. Factors examined in the study were age, gender, race, and amount and mode of media consumed.
The Sexual Media Diet (SMD) Questionnaire, along with sexual history demographics, was administered to college students (N=180) to explore how much time and type of media they consumed as they were developing through their adolescent years. Data from the survey established an association between age of sexual initiation and gender. Results indicated females consume more sexual content from the media than males but males were initiating sexual intercourse at younger ages than females. Race could not be used as a single variable to predict the age of initiating sexual intercourse. An additional finding was the ability to predict the college age student’s virgin status based on age, race, sexual media content score, protection knowledge, and sexually transmitted disease knowledge
