Gender roles on social networking sites

Subtitle:investigating reciprocal relationships between Dutch adolescents' hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity and sexy online self-presentations

Previous research has suggested that adolescents play out stereotypical gender roles in their self-presentations in social media. However, longitudinal research on the relationships between (sexy) online self-presentation and adolescents' gender role orientation is lacking. The present study investigated whether endorsing a stereotypical gender role orientation (i.e., hypermasculinity for boys, hyperfemininity for girls) predisposes adolescents to engage in sexy self-presentation or to look at others' sexy self-presentations in social media. In addition, we investigated whether engaging in sexy self-presentation and looking at others' sexy self-presentation predicted an increased hypergender orientation over time. Using a three-wave short-term longitudinal panel survey among 1467 Dutch adolescents with six-month time intervals between waves, we found that adolescents' hypergender orientation predicted more frequent sexy self-presentation and exposure to others' sexy self-presentations in social media. Hypergender orientations were not predicted by these online behaviors and no gender differences were found.

Publication year:2017

Keywords:A1 Journal article

BOF-keylabel:yes

BOF-publication weight:1

CSS-citation score:3

Authors:International

Authors from:Higher Education

Accessibility:Open