New technologies are a source of change in our society such as smartphone. The picture is then omnipresent and this is not without consequences especially in our behaviour. This is how we can see a new behaviour appearing commonly known as « nudes ». In scientific language, « nudes » are named « sexting ». The word sexting comes from the fusion of « sex » and « texting ». It is the sending or the reception of texts, photos or videos with erotic or sexual characteristics. The definition of sexting is controversial because some authors include in the definition, semi-nudes photos or videos whose can be seems as beach photos (bikini) without erotic or sexual intentions. It is important to be interested in sexting especially in relation to cyberbullying which increases these last years.
Those are few researches in this topic in France. That is why our goal is to try to describe and understand this new behaviour with a French exploratory research on this subject. For this, we were inspired by the main studied topics about sexting to investigate it in our research. Those topics are prevalence and demographic characteristics, motivations to practise sexting, risk and perception of risk about sexting.
Our method consist in leading semi-directive interviews with students, between eighteen years old and thirty years old in face to face, phone calls or video calls on Skype. We have some inclusion criteria like sexting must be practised in relationship, sex-friendship or friendship but not with strangers. Each interview is recorded and transcribed to be analysed by a manual thematic analysis. We had eleven students.
Our results deals with those several subjects : the partner, the format of sexting, the support of the sexting, motivations, positive and negative repercussions, the perception of repercussions, evolution of sexting’s practice, factors leading to practise sexting and prevention.
There are different ideas in our research.
Firstly, relational context (couple and long-distance relationship) is the one that brings mainly to practise sexting, follow-up of personality characteristics. Secondly, it appeared that sexting is not a risky behaviour for yourself and relationship because there are protective factors like confidence established with the partner and the perception of risks, which allows to be safe in sexting practice. Finally, our research allows to put a new point of view about sexting. Indeed, society and medias see sexting like a deviation of sexuality or a risky behaviour. However, our participants give us a look about sexting like a sexual practice and like a developmental task, as part in the continuity of relationship and the development of their relation, sexuality and apprehension of their body.
In discussion, we can say our research is a new one in France with a qualitative vision about the behaviour of sexting, and it gives reasons to practise the sexting and a positive vision about it, too.
There are clinical contributions : we can see sexting like a source of mediation with couple when they encounter sexual difficulties or also using photography more often when there are difficulties in apprehension of body. For instance, with illness, eating behaviour disorder, low self-esteem or difficulty in understanding body following violence.
It is necessary to deal with theoretical and methodological limits in our research. For example, theoretical limit is the difficulty to compare our research with others because it is in another country, with quantitative vision and own definition about sexting. Then, there are methodological limits : number of participants with the saturation of the data, semi-directive interview with the bias of researcher like interpretation and categorization.
We have some ideas about futures researches on sexting :
- seeing the research of our colleague which deals with sexting with strangers
- sexting with teenagers because we see a risk in this population in other researches on sexting and in speech of our participants. It is necessary to put a limit about our positive vision on sexting in this research because it depends on several factors : context of relation, age, the will to answer to our research, … because, even in couple, other researches show risks for relation.
- question about the link of sexting and personality (anxious character) and attachment.
Sexting is a new behaviour draws attention on it but it is necessary to further information about this behaviour because it exists really some risks in some context of sexting practice, out of benefits to practise it and the fact that sexting is a sexual practice like others.
Words I have learned:
- Such as = comme, tel que
- Controversial = controversé
- Risky behaviour = comportement à risque
- To draw attention = attirer l’attention
- Follow-up of = suivi de
Written by Marine RODAK, M2 PCPI