Transformation of Adolescent Peer Relations in the Social Media Context: Part 2—Application to Peer Group Processes and Future Directions for Research

As social media use becomes increasingly widespread among adolescents, research in this area has accumulated rapidly. Researchers have shown a growing interest in the impact of social media on adolescents’ peer experiences, including the ways that the social media context shapes a variety of peer relations constructs. This paper represents Part 2 of a two-part theoretical review. In this review, we offer a new model for understanding the transformative role of social media in adolescents’ peer experiences, with the goal of stimulating future empirical work that is grounded in theory. The transformation framework suggests that the features of the social media context transform adolescents’ peer experiences by changing their frequency or immediacy, amplifying demands, altering their qualitative nature, and/or offering new opportunities for compensatory or novel behaviors. In the current paper, we consider the ways that social media may transform peer relations constructs that often occur at the group level. Our review focuses on three key constructs: peer victimization, peer status, and peer influence. We selectively review and highlight existing evidence for the transformation of these domains through social media. In addition, we discuss methodological considerations and key conceptual principles for future work. The current framework offers a new theoretical perspective through which peer relations researchers may consider adolescent social media use.     

Review of the Evidence for Motivation Deficits in Youth with ADHD and Their Association with Functional Outcomes

Preeminent theories of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) suggest that motivation deficits are core underlying features of the disorder. However, it is currently unclear whether empirical evidence supports the assertion that significant group (ADHD v. comparison) differences in motivation exist or that problems with motivation contribute to the functional impairments that youth with ADHD experience. Accordingly, this review focused on evaluating and summarizing the empirical literature on the presence of motivation deficits and their association with functional outcomes in samples of youth with ADHD. Twenty studies met the review inclusion criteria. Results support the assertion that youth with ADHD have lower academic-related motivation in comparison to their peers and that motivation plays an important role in academic outcomes, with the strongest evidence to date for reading achievement. However, the available evidence is limited, and few existing studies are aligned with the much larger theoretical and empirical motivation literature in typically developing youth. Given preliminary evidence that motivation plays a role in the academic impairments of youth with ADHD, the review concludes with a discussion of whether current ADHD interventions adequately target motivation and highlights important future directions.     

What’s on Sale? A Discourse Analysis of Four Distinctive Online Escort Advertisement Websites

Technological advances have contributed to the changing structure and organisation of sex work, heralding a dramatic growth in sex workers soliciting and advertising the selling of sex via the Internet. This study was concerned with four distinctive, independent online escort markets—male heterosexual, female heterosexual, gay and lesbian. A discourse analysis was conducted on ten online advertisements from each escort sample, in order to analyse how different online escorts advertise their sexual services in relation to gender, sexuality and social class. The findings reveal core differences between each of the escort samples in relation to gender and power dynamics. Findings highlighted that maleness and masculinity-as-power play a role whether we are looking at men as the buyers or the sellers of escort services. In stark contrast, advertisements presented femaleness and femininity as objectified, submissive and/or vulnerable regardless as to whether we are looking at women as the buyers or the sellers of escort services.     

Medical Trainees’ Readiness for the Promotion of Sexual Health in Tunisia: A Cross Sectional Study

In the Arab and Muslim countries, there are several taboos of sexuality. To overcome the latter, and to distinguish between cultural and scientific data, sexual education is a key measure, especially during medical studies. The purpose of this study was to assess the knowledge of the Tunisian medical trainees and to identify their sources of information concerning sexuality. We conducted a survey among medical trainees of the faculty of medicine of Sfax, in Tunisia. An anonymous questionnaire was distributed to 171 and completed by 157 trainees (91.8%). The sources of knowledge about sexuality were: friends (81.5%; N = 128), internet (77.1%; N = 121), television and movies (68.2%; N = 107), courses at the faculty (40.1%; N = 63) and parents (22.9%; N = 36). The score of correct answers was higher than or equal to 75% for 28 trainees (17.8%). It was on average 63.3%. It was correlated with male gender (p = 0.006), being a second-year trainee (p = 0.017) and television and movies as a source of knowledge about sexuality (p = 0.008). Masturbation was considered pathological by 17.2% of participants (N = 27). A 5-min period of intercourse was deemed sufficient to have a female orgasm by 44 trainees (28%). Andropause and menopause are inconsistent with a satisfying sexuality according to 44.6% (N = 70) and 56.1% (N = 88) of the participants respectively.     

Good Ol’ Country Boys Playin’ on the Farm: Online Articulations of Rural Masculinity by Men Who Have Sex with Men

This study seeks to fill existing gaps in the literature about the lives of rurally-situated men who have sex with men (MSM). Much work in this field grapples with identity construction and the unique contexts faced by queer, gay, or MSM in rural areas. This study explores the ways in which this population utilizes Craigslist as a means to articulate and perform rural masculinity. Findings suggest that MSM located within rural topographies often deploy culturally contingent masculine traits specific to rural cultural and geographic locations. The relationship that rural MSM have with the Internet is complex and dialectical in nature. The present study leads the author to conceptualize rural MSM’s relationship to both rurality and same-sex sexual behavior in two primary ways: (1) to queer or fetishize the rural, and similarly, (2) to ‘ruralize’ the queer.     

Investigating the Language of Sexting on the Social Media and Its Impact on Spousal Relationships in Nigeria

Several scholarly works abound on the language of sexting and how it affects users’ lives. This study is an attempt to investigate the language of sexting on the social media and its impact on spousal relationship in Nigeria. Sexting is defined here as the sending and receiving of sexually inclined messages or pictures via any of the social media. We have purposively selected a screenshot sexting message of a popular Nigerian comedian. The methodology adopted is eclectic. We use pragmatic tools with insights from the epistemological and critical tools of philosophy. We also use ideas from semiotics to analyse the smileys in the text. We also conducted interviews with purposively selected educated married Nigerians to study the printed screenshot message and interpret the meanings they can deduce from the message. Findings reveal that the language of sexting is highly of coded forms. The discourse strategies used include: slang, ellipsis and smileys. The conversational pattern reveals a flouting of the conversational maxims of quantity and relevance. A lot of shared beliefs are also foregrounded in the use of the elliptical sign and slang words. The message attached to the screenshot message is a pract of warning with 3 speech acts: declarative, assertive and directive. Sexting is a common feature of new trends on the social media. It serves several functions for the chat partners. If the motivation for sexting is not understood, its practice could generate crises among spouses. Sexting opens up different angles for linguistic interpretation and its psychological realities cannot be generalized.     

“My iPhone Changed My Life”: How Digital Technologies Can Enable Women’s Consumption of Online Sexually Explicit Materials

Digital technologies continue to change the ways women can access and consume sexual materials online, including pornography. Yet, limited research has considered the possibilities of digital technologies to enhance women’s access and consumption of online pornographic materials. In this paper, we use a cyberfeminist lens to examine women’s experiences consuming online sexually explicit materials, which most women defined as pornography including videos and images. In particular, we consider the ways women who identify as porn consumers can use digital technologies to enable and enhance their consumption of these pornographic materials. Drawing on qualitative, in-depth interviews with 11 women, our findings illustrate the ways women can use digital technologies to consume pornography online in ways that help them to fulfill their sexual needs, embrace and explore their sexual selves, connect in sexual relationships, and normalize their sexual desires.     

“Bad Girls” Say No and “Good Girls” Say Yes: Sexual Subjectivity and Participation in Undesired Sex During Heterosexual College Hookups

Young people’s sexuality is often discursively constructed within the confines of a masculine/feminine binary that minimizes young women’s sexual subjectivity (i.e., desire, pleasure, and agency) while taking young men’s subjectivity for granted. Accordingly, young women who acknowledge themselves as sexual subjects are constructed as “bad girls” who incite males’ purportedly uncontrollable desire and, thus, invite undesired sexual attention. However, there is reason to hypothesize that young women who view themselves as sexual subjects may be less likely than other women to engage in undesired sexual activity (i.e., sex that their partners desire, but they do not desire for themselves). In this study, I used data from the Online College Social Life Survey (N = 7255) to explore relationships between two measures of sexual subjectivity (i.e., pleasure prioritization and sexual agency) and college women’s participation in undesired sexual activity during hookups (i.e., performance of undesired sexual acts to please a partner and succumbing to verbal pressure for intercourse). Logistic regression analyses suggest that pleasure prioritization and sexual agency are associated with lower odds of performing undesired sexual acts to please a partner—and sexual agency is associated with lower odds of succumbing to verbal pressure for intercourse. These findings point to the importance of sexuality education that includes discussions of women’s sexual subjectivity.     

Young Women’s Experience of Sexuality: A Battle of Pleasure and Sexual Purity in the Context of Malaysian Society

Little is known regarding the ways in which Malaysian women’s sexuality is constructed, and how their personal experiences, culture, religion and society influence their feeling, attitude and sexual behaviours. This study explored the sexual experiences of young adult women in the developing context of the country. A qualitative phenomenological approach was adopted. Purposive sampling was employed, and a total of 20 participants were recruited, comprised of the major ethnic groups in Malaysia. Four main themes emerged through the phenomenological analysis of the data, including: conditional pleasure; social honour and women’s purity; risk and responsibility; and transcendence of love and emotion. The findings of this study revealed that sexuality was experienced under the control of religion and society with the concern of conserving a woman’s purity and social honour; and imposing risks and responsibility on women. Despite the awareness of women’s right to experience sexual pleasure, it was commonly perceived that sexual activities beyond the social norms will result in social shaming and guilt. The authors recommend appropriate sexuality education regarding sexual assertiveness and communication, safe-sex practices, and improving sexual decision-making skills.     

Are Deaf Dating Scripts Really Different from Those of Their Hearing Peers?

An initial study found that Deaf participants have a different definition of a date than the Traditional Sex Script (TSS). In the TSS, the man is viewed as the initiator who pushes for sex and the woman is expected to limit sex if they do not want to have intercourse; neither of these ideas were included in Deaf participants’ responses when asked what happens on a typical date. These findings may relate to early experiences in childhood. At an early age, hearing children are exposed to the TSS through popular culture. Deaf children are not exposed to these cues at the same level because of their lack of communication access. Here we compare Deaf college students to hearing college students to further investigate these issues using a more quantitative design.