Sexting outside the primary relationship: Prevalence, relationship influences, physical engagement, and perceptions of “cheating”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research has not yet investigated the frequency of sexting outside of a primary relationship. Research consistently shows that most sexting occurs within the context of a relationship, but few studies have taken relationship status into account. Additionally, limited research has investigated if sexting is considered infidelity. This study aims to fill those gaps by examining sexting outside of the primary relationship. University students and community members were asked about their sexting activities outside of their primary relationship using an online questionnaire. Results indicate that 23% of participants have sexted outside of their relationship. Those who cohabitate with their primary partner or are in a non-monogamous relationship are more likely to sext with a secondary partner. The majority of people who sext outside of their relationship do so with five or less partners and do so less than once a month, indicating that sexting outside of the primary relationship is infrequent. Seventy-five percent of those that sexted secondary partners considered this act cheating. Lastly, 36% also engaged in face-to-face sexual activity with the secondary partners they sexted. The importance of considering relationship status variables in understanding sexting and infidelity is discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".