Sexting behaviors and social skills in teenagers Conductas de sexting y habilidades sociales en adolescentes

Abstract

Sexting is a phenomenon studied in the current digital context that represents a sexual risk behavior to which are mainly exposed adolescents, whose social skills are in development and, therefore, can be affected by the exchange of explicit content as a form of interaction between peers. Considering the limited availability of research in the Ecuadorian context, the present study aims to analyze the relationship between sexting behaviors and the social skills of 79 young people from 12 to 19 years old in an educational institution in the city of Quito. The study found that men practice more sexting predominantly at age of 16, but while women practice it less, it prevails at earlier ages. Regarding Social Skills (SS), those less developed were the advanced ones, and the most developed were the skills to cope with stress in early and late adolescence. For data collection, we used two instruments: the Sexting Behavior Scale (Chacón et al., 2018) and the Goldstein Social Skills Checklist (adapted by Daza and Estévez, 2022); for the analysis, we used the Pearson correlation, which resulted in a value of -0.222 with a significance of 0.049, indicating the presence of a significant and negative correlation. The study concludes that the higher the level of social skills, the lower the practice of sexting.

Keywords: sexting, social skills, adolescence, prevalence, development, risk behaviors.