Teenage Sexuality and Media Practice: Factoring in the Influences of Family, Friends, and School - Statistical Data Included

Journal of Sex Research, Nov, 1999 by Jeanne Rogge Steele

Publication of North Carolina's first statewide survey of adolescent sexual behavior revealed that a majority of Tar Heel teens were engaging in sex while in high school, and many were becoming sexually active in middle school. One out of six teens who took part in the 1994 National Youth Risk Behavior Survey said they had lost their virginity by age 13. Nearly three quarters of the 2,439 students surveyed reported having engaged in intercourse by the 12th grade. And despite their growing awareness that condoms were the best defense against contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, nearly half of these young people reported they did not use them. In fact, one third of the sexually active students reported they used no birth control at all (Sheehan, 1994). In line with national statistics (AGI, 1994), the study results pointed to a hard reality: All adolescents are vulnerable when it comes to risky sexual behavior. It was against this backdrop that the qualitative study reported here was launched.

The study was guided by the premise that if we can figure out how adolescents with different personal and social identities and sociocultural backgrounds select, interact, and apply media matter in their everyday lives, we will be able to do a better job of reaching them with media messages that they will listen to and act on. Key questions included: What role does the mass media play in national trends of early sexual intercourse, unplanned teenage pregnancies, and out-of-wedlock births? How do mass media images and messages about love, sex, and relationships interact with what teens learn at home, in school, and from their friends? How do teens assimilate through media practice what they learn about sexuality in the course of their everyday lives?

In previous empirical work on adolescents' room culture (Brown, Dykers, Steele, & White, 1994), we had found that many teens draw heavily from media images and storylines as they wrestle with who they are and where they fit in the world. Working from a developmental perspective that recognized identity formation as a key task of adolescence, we devised a model that explained how adolescents' media practice revolved around identity (Steele & Brown, 1995). Drawing on sociogenetic theories of development (Valsiner, 1991; Vygotsky, 1978), we asserted that media practice could only be understood in context. It was with the embodied knowledge acquired through "lived through experience," Steele and Brown (1995) reasoned, that teens "build on and transform the shared sociocultural knowledge available through the media" (p. 557). However, in these earlier studies we had not looked more broadly to see how media practice intersected with the everyday activities and systems of social interactions that make up teens' everyday lives. Our understanding of Lived Experience was theoretically rather than empirically driven.

This study takes the next step and considers the dialectic give-and-take between teens and media in the context of their everyday lives. For most adolescents, that context includes interactions with family in various configurations and with school and friend or peer networks. Church and job affiliations also play prominent roles in some adolescents' lives, but they seem to follow from family and peer influences. Consequently, they were not included among the domains studied.

The study complements two mass communication research streams: content analyses of sexual content in the mass media and media effects research focusing on teenagers. (Effects studies on adolescent sexuality are rare.) Researchers have done a good job of chronicling the kinds and amount of sexual media content available to teens, but knowing what teens can access is not the same as knowing how they use or make sense of what's available. Also, most content analyses focus on a single medium, even though most teens interact with multiple media on a daily basis. Television has received the most research attention, even though magazines, music, and movies become increasingly important sources of information about sex and ways to be as teens grow older (Greenberg, Brown, & Buerkel-Rothfuss, 1993; Huston, Wartella, & Donnerstein, 1998).

In hopes of remedying some of these problems, this study considered how teens weave sexual media content drawn from all of the major media into their identities through media practice. The study was grounded in the belief that the mass media constitute a rich and diverse tool kit (Swidler, 1986; Wertsch, 1991) of sexual scripts (Simon & Gagnon, 1986) and role models that teens use as they explore the possible selves (Markus & Nurius, 1986) they might become. Special attention was paid to what occurs when teens' media practices intersect with the influences of family, friends, and school.

METHOD

The study was a qualitative, multi-method investigation designed like a funnel--wide at the top (in terms of numbers of participants and areas of inquiry) to generate a broad understanding of teens' media practices, and narrower in focus at the bottom to explore emerging themes in greater depth. The first phase consisted of eight focused group discussions in which a total of 51 teens participated. A subset of these teens, one to three from each focus group, kept written or tape-recorded media journals and then participated in a room tour(1) or in-depth interview.(2) In addition to being suited to the grounded theory approach recommended by Glaser & Strauss (1967), the triangulated data-gathering structure created an opportunity to compare how the teens interacted and what they had to say in a group setting with their behavior and expressions in the one-on-one context of room tours (Steele & Brown, 1995) and in-depth interviews.