Connecting Social Problems and Popular Culture by Karen Sternheimer

Author:Karen Sternheimer [Sternheimer, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813347233
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 2013-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Studying Sex: Media Research Makes News

In addition to violence, American media-effects researchers continually attempt to find negative connections between teen’s sexual behavior and media. Using correlation studies, which measure relationships but cannot assess cause and effect, several studies have claimed that watching sexual content leads to actual sex by teens.36

One very interesting study, published in the journal Pediatrics, interviewed nearly eighteen hundred young people aged twelve through seventeen about their sexual experiences, television viewing, and other factors that may lead to earlier sexual behavior. They then reinterviewed them one year later to see what factors were most associated with sexual advancement. While they found that watching sexual situations on television is associated with more sexual behavior, other important factors, like age, parents’ education, and scoring high on a “sensation-seeking” scale, were actually stronger factors in predicting sexual behavior.

Other important predictors, including having many older friends and engaging in other risky behaviors, are included in the analysis, but the authors don’t discuss these issues in their recommendations. The authors acknowledge that they cannot really assess cause and effect here; teens thinking about having sex may be more likely to watch sexual situations on television. Nonetheless, they conclude that reducing sexual content on television would delay teen sex.37

Researchers’ continued focus on television as the main problem, even when their own research offers more important findings, reinforces the public’s belief that television and media are the keys to change. Likewise, the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) has conducted several studies of sex on television, mostly looking for reasons to attribute risky and dangerous teen sexual behavior to popular culture. Examination of studies like these reveals our tendency to underestimate social structure and overstate the power of popular culture.

While the authors of the most recent KFF study, published in 2005, note the importance of peers, parents, and schools in sexual socialization, television is the main focus of their study. Researchers analyzed more than a thousand television programs, counting incidents they deemed sexual in nature.38 By using content analysis, researchers determined the meaning of sexual messages of these programs, yet they interviewed no young people to ascertain how teens actually interpret these messages. This method isolates meaning from the context of both the program and the audience, a problem the researchers don’t seem to be worried about.

Additionally, this study broadly defines sexual messages to include seductive gestures, flirting, alluding to sex, touching, kissing, and implication of intercourse. When the incidents get boiled down into statistics, hugs and handholding can appear the same as more explicit representations of sex. Their biggest finding: 70 percent of the shows they included in the 2005 study had some form of “sexual” content, up from 64 percent in 2002 and 56 percent in 1998.39

The authors surmise that “televised portrayals of intercourse play a role in socializing young viewers to the patterns of behavior that are normative in our culture.”40 But the study never tests its assumptions about youth empirically in this or their previous studies. The researchers seem to presume that

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