Effects of a Peer-Led Media Literacy Curriculum on Adolescents' Knowledge and Attitudes Toward Sexual Behavior and Media Portrayals of Sex

Abstract

The United States has the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and birth in the Western industrialized world, and research indicates that television and other mass media are important sources of sexual information for young people. The purpose of this study was to determine if a teen-led, media literacy curriculum focused on sexual portrayals in the media would increase adolescents' awareness of media myths concerning sex, decrease the allure of sexualized portrayals, and decrease positive expectancies for sexual activity. A posttest-only quasi-experiment with control groups was conducted at 22 school and community sites in Washington state (N = 532). The intervention, a 5-lesson media literacy curriculum targeted primarily to middle school students, encouraged sexual abstinence because of federal government funding requirements. Adolescents evaluated the program positively, with 85% rating it as better than other sex education programs. Compared to control-group participants, students were less likely to overestimate sexual activity among teens, more likely to think they could delay sexual activity, less likely to expect social benefits from sexual activity, more aware of myths about sex, and less likely to consider sexual media imagery desirable. The results showed that media literacy has promise as part of a sex education program by providing adolescents with a cognitive framework necessary to understand and resist the influence of media on their decision making concerning sex.

Perceived Realism Moderates the Relation Between Sexualized Media Consumption and Permissive Sexual Attitudes in Dutch Adolescents

“…With the increasing pervasiveness of sexualized media in mind (Kunkel et al, 2005;Strasburger, 2012a), it is easy to assume that adolescents will blindly copy what they come across in the media. For some adolescents this may be the case and this warrants further research on media literacy and the interpretation of mass media (Brown, 2002;Pinkleton, Austin, Cohen, Chen, & Fitzgerald, 2008). For others, their media literacy may have enabled them to critically evaluate media content.…”

Sexuality, Contraception, and the Media

“…Studies have shown that effective media literacy programs can be protective against unhealthy media effects. 90,91 Federal money should be spent on comprehensive sex education programs but not on abstinence-only programs, which have been found to be ineffective. 35,[65][66][67][68][92][93][94] 5.…”

Evaluation of the Effects of the Sexual Education Programme SOMOS on Sexual Experience and Attitudes of Adolescents Towards Sexuality // Evaluación de los efectos del Programa de Educación Sexual SOMOS sobre la experiencia sexual y las actitudes hacia la sexualidad de adolescentes

“…Another of the areas that was analyzed is the impact of programmes on the development and improvement of attitudes. In the case of attitude and willingness to use the preservative or towards safe sexual practices, it has been noted that when, included in the curricula, these aspects produce an important improvement in those attitudes (Clark et al, 2005;Givaudan & Pick, 2005;Jennings et al, 2014;Scull et al, 2014;Walcott et al, 2011), while works that have evaluated the general attitude towards the human sexual act find a positive increase in these types of attitudes (Carrera et al, 2007;Pinkleton, Austin, Cohen, Chen, & Fitzgerald, 2008;Taylor et al, 2014). With regard to sexual behaviour, other studies have centred on analyzing the influences of educational proposals, agreeing that they reduce at-risk sexual practices and increase the use of the preservative (Bourke, Boduszek, Kelleher, McBride, & Morgan, 2014;Kirby, 2011), and even, in some cases, delay the onset of sexual coital activity (Duberstein & Maddow-Zimet, 2012;Kirby, 2011).…”