WITHDRAWN: Adolescents’ Engagement in Sexting within Their Romantic Relationship and Its Associations with Perceptions of Love and Conflict

Introduction

While some studies have focused on the associations between sexting and relationship satisfaction among adults, little attention has been paid to how adolescents who engage in sexting with their romantic partner perceive their own relationship. The aim of our study is to address the gap in the literature on adolescent sexting and romantic relationship characteristics by investigating the associations between sending sexually explicit photographs to a romantic partner and adolescents’ perceptions of intimacy, passion, commitment, and perceived conflict within the romantic relationship. The results of this study will allow us to better understand the relational context in which adolescent sexting takes place.

Methods

 We report on a survey that was conducted in Flanders, Belgium among among 2626 students (n=1530; 58.4%girls) in 10 secondary schools in Flanders, Belgium. This article reports on a subsample of 657 adolescents between 14 and 18 years old (n=415; 63.3%girls; Mage=16.41; SDage=.94). Sexting was measured by asking how often “the respondents had send a sexually explicit picture (naked or half-naked) of themselves to their romantic partner, via the Internet or the mobile phone”. Measures included: Triangular love scale (Overbeek et al., 2007), Perceived verbal conflict within the romantic relationship (Kerig, 1996), relationship length, and prior sexual behavior. Linear regressions were used to analyze the relationships.

Results

The model examined the associations between the independent variables and the sending of self-made sexually explicit photographs. The explained variance of the model was 10.8%. Adolescents’ perceptions of passion (β=.13; p<.001) and higher levels of self-reported verbal aggression (β=.20; p<.001) were significantly related with their engagement in sexting. Of the control variables only having had sexual intercourse was significantly related with sending sexually explicit photographs to the romantic partner (β=.16; p<.001). There were no significant relationships between the dependent variable and gender (β=-.05; p=.21), age (β= .01; p=.72), or relationship length (β=.01; p=.87).

Conclusions

The results suggest that associations between sexting and relationship satisfaction are limited. Sexting could function as a digital way to express and sustain feelings in their romantic relationship, for young people who have a need for sexual and physical proximity. The significant associations with higher levels of perceived verbal aggression contribute to evidence that adolescent sexting is linked with violence within romantic relationships. This might be worrisome, as previous research found that sexting messages are often exposed to others as revenge following conflicts or a romantic break-up. Future research is warranted to investigate the role of sexting and sexting incidents within dating violence and romantic conflict.