ELK GROVE VILLAGE, Ill. (ABP) — A regular diet of TV that's high in sexual content can encourage teenagers to engage in sexual activity sooner, according to a recently released study.
Researchers interviewed 1,792 teenagers about their TV viewing habits and sexual activity. Initial surveys were taken in 2001, with follow-up interviews the next year.
“Adolescents who viewed more sexual content at baseline were more likely to initiate intercourse and progress to more advanced … sexual activities during the subsequent year,” researchers wrote in Pediatrics online journal.
“TV may create the illusion that sex is more central to daily life than it truly is and may promote sexual initiation as a result,” the researchers state.
The researchers found that 64 percent of all TV programs contained sexual content during the 2001-2002 season, the period studied by the survey. They also noted a 1999 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation that found youth watch an average of three hours of television each day.
“Youths in the 90th percentile of TV sex viewing had a predicted probability of intercourse initiation that was approximately double that of youths in the 10th percentile,” they wrote.
“It's social learning: 'monkey see, monkey do,” psychologist Rebecca Collins, the study's lead author, told USA Today. “If everyone's talking about sex or having it, and something bad hardly ever comes out of it, because it doesn't on TV, then they think, 'Hey, the whole world's doing it, and I need to.'”
The study's authors found no significant difference between teenagers who watched portrayals of sexual talk and those who watched sexual behavior. “It apparently makes little difference whether a TV show presents people talking about whether they have sex or shows them actually having sex.”
Jane Brown, a University of North Carolina media researcher who specializes in adolescents, told USA Today that teens whose parents supervise their activities closely are less likely to watch sexually oriented shows.
“Most important is keeping the set out of the children's bedrooms because otherwise the kids have complete control over what they watch,” Brown said, adding that roughly 60 percent of teens have TVs in their bedrooms.
The study, “Watching Sex on Television Predicts Adolescent Initiation of Sexual Behavior,” can be accessed at pediatrics.org.
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