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Casual Sexual Scripts on the Screen: A Quantitative Content Analysis

While existing content analyses have provided insightful information in terms of contextual factors and frequency of sexual behaviors, not much is known about the relational context in which sexual depictions generally occur. The current study addresses this void by employing content analytic method...

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Autores principales: Timmermans, Elisabeth, Van den Bulck, Jan
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer US 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5954064/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29589163
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10508-018-1147-1
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author Timmermans, Elisabeth
Van den Bulck, Jan
author_facet Timmermans, Elisabeth
Van den Bulck, Jan
author_sort Timmermans, Elisabeth
collection PubMed
description While existing content analyses have provided insightful information in terms of contextual factors and frequency of sexual behaviors, not much is known about the relational context in which sexual depictions generally occur. The current study addresses this void by employing content analytic methods to measure the frequency and context of depictions of sexual behavior within nine popular television shows produced in the U.S., while taking into account the type of sexual behavior. The results suggest that, in the analyzed television shows, sexual behaviors within a casual sexual context were almost as frequently shown as sexual behaviors within a committed relationship context. Whereas sexual behaviors within a committed relationship context were mainly limited to passionate kissing, sexual behaviors within a casual sexual context mostly consisted of explicit portrayals of sexual intercourse. Additionally, genre seemed to be an important factor when examining casual sexual television content. The situational comedy genre, for example, had no explicit portrayals of intercourse and mainly portrayed kissing couples within a committed relationship. The comedy drama genre, on the contrary, had the largest proportion of explicit sexual portrayals, usually between casual sexual partners. A second goal of this study was to analyze the portrayals of the typical casual sexual experience script and the typical casual sexual relationship script in which these sexual behaviors often occur. For instance, our analyses revealed that female characters were more likely to initiate casual sex compared to male characters. Moreover, casual sex often occurred between former partners.
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spelling pubmed-59540642018-05-18 Casual Sexual Scripts on the Screen: A Quantitative Content Analysis Timmermans, Elisabeth Van den Bulck, Jan Arch Sex Behav Original Paper While existing content analyses have provided insightful information in terms of contextual factors and frequency of sexual behaviors, not much is known about the relational context in which sexual depictions generally occur. The current study addresses this void by employing content analytic methods to measure the frequency and context of depictions of sexual behavior within nine popular television shows produced in the U.S., while taking into account the type of sexual behavior. The results suggest that, in the analyzed television shows, sexual behaviors within a casual sexual context were almost as frequently shown as sexual behaviors within a committed relationship context. Whereas sexual behaviors within a committed relationship context were mainly limited to passionate kissing, sexual behaviors within a casual sexual context mostly consisted of explicit portrayals of sexual intercourse. Additionally, genre seemed to be an important factor when examining casual sexual television content. The situational comedy genre, for example, had no explicit portrayals of intercourse and mainly portrayed kissing couples within a committed relationship. The comedy drama genre, on the contrary, had the largest proportion of explicit sexual portrayals, usually between casual sexual partners. A second goal of this study was to analyze the portrayals of the typical casual sexual experience script and the typical casual sexual relationship script in which these sexual behaviors often occur. For instance, our analyses revealed that female characters were more likely to initiate casual sex compared to male characters. Moreover, casual sex often occurred between former partners. Springer US 2018-03-27 2018 /pmc/articles/PMC5954064/ /pubmed/29589163 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10508-018-1147-1 Text en © The Author(s) 2018 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Original Paper
Timmermans, Elisabeth
Van den Bulck, Jan
Casual Sexual Scripts on the Screen: A Quantitative Content Analysis
title Casual Sexual Scripts on the Screen: A Quantitative Content Analysis
title_full Casual Sexual Scripts on the Screen: A Quantitative Content Analysis
title_fullStr Casual Sexual Scripts on the Screen: A Quantitative Content Analysis
title_full_unstemmed Casual Sexual Scripts on the Screen: A Quantitative Content Analysis
title_short Casual Sexual Scripts on the Screen: A Quantitative Content Analysis
title_sort casual sexual scripts on the screen: a quantitative content analysis
topic Original Paper
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5954064/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29589163
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10508-018-1147-1
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