Scripts of Sexual Desire and Danger in US and Dutch Teen Girl Magazines: A Cross-National Content Analysis

The aim of this comparative quantitative content analysis was to investigate how US and Dutch teen girl magazines cover sexual desire (i.e., sexual wanting, and pleasure) and sexual danger (i.e., sexual risk, and negative physical/health consequences of sex). Relying on the sexual scripts framework and Hofstede’s cultural dimension of masculinity/femininity, we examined (a) how the coverage varied for boys and girls, (b) how it differed between the United States and the Netherlands, and (c) how gender differences varied by country. The sample comprised 627 sex-related feature stories from all 2006–2008 issues of three US (i.e., Seventeen, CosmoGirl! United States edition, and Teen) and three Dutch teen girl magazines (i.e., Fancy, CosmoGirl! Netherlands edition, and Girlz!). Overall, sexual wanting occurred more frequently in the US magazines than in the Dutch magazines. In the US coverage, boys’ sexual wanting received more attention than girls’ sexual wanting, whereas in the Dutch coverage sexual wanting was depicted equally often for boys and girls. The depiction of sexual pleasure did not vary by gender in either country, but was generally more visible in the Dutch magazines than in the US magazines. Sexual risks and the negative consequences of sex were associated with girls more than with boys, and were primarily depicted in the US magazines rather than in the Dutch magazines

The Ability of the AIDS Quilt to Motivate Information Seeking, Personal Discussion, and Preventative Behavior as a Health Communication Intervention

A Solomon 4-group-design-style field experiment examined the ability of the NAMES Project Foundation\u27s AIDS Memorial Quilt (AIDS Quilt) to motivate information seeking, personal discussion, and behavioral outcomes among those who viewed it. Results indicate that the AIDS Quilt intervention explained significant differences in information-seeking motivations and information-seeking behavior. Information-seeking motivation positively predicted actual information-seeking behavior, which in turn predicted increased discussion and decreased risky behavior. Information-seeking motivation in itself did not predict discussion or behavior. The results suggest that campaigns designed primarily to increase information-seeking motivation can result in desired behavioral outcomes