Google for Sexual Relationships: Mixed-Methods Study on Digital Flirting and Online Dating Among Adolescent Youth and Young Adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: According to a 2015 report from the Pew Research Center, nearly 24% of teens go online almost constantly and 92% of teens are accessing the internet daily; consequently, a large part of adolescent romantic exploration has moved online, where young people are turning to the Web for romantic relationship-building and sexual experience. This digital change in romantic behaviors among youth has implications for public health and sexual health programs, but little is known about the ways in which young people use online spaces for sexual exploration. An examination of youth sexual health and relationships online and the implications for adolescent health programs has yet to be fully explored. OBJECTIVE: Although studies have documented increasing rates of sexually transmitted infections and HIV among young people, many programs continue to neglect online spaces as avenues for understanding sexual exploration. Little is known about the online sexual health practices of young people, including digital flirting and online dating. This study explores the current behaviors and opinions of youth throughout online sexual exploration, relationship-building, and online dating, further providing insights into youth behavior for intervention opportunities. METHODS: From January through December 2016, an exploratory study titled TECHsex used a mixed-methods approach to document information-seeking behaviors and sexual health building behaviors of youth online in the United States. Data from a national quantitative survey of 1500 youth and 12 qualitative focus groups (66 youth) were triangulated to understand the experiences and desires of young people as they navigate their sexual relationships through social media, online chatting, and online dating. RESULTS: Young people are using the internet to begin sexual relationships with others, including dating, online flirting, and hooking up. Despite the fact that dating sites have explicit rules against minor use, under 18 youth are using these products regardless in order to make friends and begin romantic relationships, albeit at a lower rate than their older peers (19.0% [64/336] vs 37.8% [440/1163], respectively). Nearly 70% of youth who have used online dating sites met up with someone in person (44.78% [30/67] under 18 vs 74.0% [324/438] over 18). Focus group respondents provided further context into online sexual exploration; many learned of sex through pornography, online dating profiles, or through flirting on social media. Social media played an important role in vetting potential partners and beginning romantic relationships. Youth also reported using online dating and flirting despite fears of violence or catfishing, in which online profiles are used to deceive others. CONCLUSIONS: Youth are turning to online spaces to build sexual relationships, particularly in areas where access to peers is limited. Although online dating site use is somewhat high, more youth turn to social media for online dating. Sexual relationship-building included online flirting and online dating websites and/or apps. These findings have implications for future sexual health programs interested in improving the sexual health outcomes of young people. Researchers may be neglecting to include social media as potential sources of youth hookup culture and dating. We implore researchers and organizations to consider the relationships young people have with technology in order to more strategically use these platforms to create successful and youth-centered programs to improve sexual health outcomes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".