Relationship between sexting and self-esteem, depression, anxiety, and stress among young people

Abstract Introduction The huge spread of the internet and especially of social media has led to new ways of communication, even erotic communication, especially among young people, replacing, in many cases, activities that until now required the face-to-face meeting of individuals. Aim To investigate the relationship between sexting and self-esteem, depression, anxiety, and stress among young people. Also, we investigated the impact of demographic characteristics on sexting. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted with 368 young people aged 18-30 years old. We created an anonymous form of the study questionnaire with Google forms and we disseminated it through social media. Thus, we obtained a convenience sample. We used valid scales to measure sexting, self-esteem, depression, anxiety and stress among young people. All scales in our study had very good Cronbach ‘s alpha. Results Mean age of the participants was 23.7 years, while 82.3% was females. Mean every day time that participants spent on social media/platforms/applications was 4.7 hours. Participants used more often to communicate with others Instagram (86.8%) and Facebook (62.8%), and then Viber (29.9%), TikTok (9.8%), Snapchat (6%) and WhatsApp (5.1%). Frequency of texting was low among participants, while self-esteem level was average. Moreover, participants had higher levels of stress than depression and anxiety. We found that increased sexting was associated with decreased self-esteem (r=-0.3, p=0.02), increased depression (r=0.4, p=0.001), increased anxiety (r=0.3, p=0.005), and increased stress (r=0.4, p<0.001). Multivariable linear regression analysis identified that increased number of accounts on social media/platforms/applications (coefficient beta=0.07, 95% confidence interval=0.01 to 0.13, p-value=0.023) and increased age (coefficient beta=0.08, 95% confidence interval=0.01 to 0.13, p-value=0.003) was associated with increased sexting. Conclusions Understanding the relationship between sexting and self-esteem, depression, anxiety, and stress in young people will give policy makers the opportunity to develop appropriate health education programmes to reduce risky sexual behaviors.