A qualitative study of children, young people and 'sexting ... - NSPCC

A qualitative study of children, young people and ‘sexting’
populations, though School One has a higher proportion of students eligible for free school meals.
Both schools are located in geographical areas associated with gang activity and crime. While the two
schools had similar Ofsted attainment and SES levels, their approaches to e-safety were quite different.
School Two had recently implemented e-safety software that enabled monitoring of student computer
activity, while School One did not actively monitor students’ computer use. The different approaches
to e-safety provided a point of comparison, while working with two schools with similar contexts of
socioeconomic deprivation and high numbers of students from minority ethnic backgrounds enabled
us to explore sexting scenarios in depth with a larger sample of students from a mix of cultural, ethnic
and religious backgrounds. The next stage of research in this area will need to capture the experiences
of more privileged young people, as well as young people living in more suburban and rural locations.
As noted above, existing quantitative research has suggested that young people experience ‘sexting’
differently across age cohorts from ages 11–16. Our research aimed to explore the meaning behind these
statistics with younger and older students at our sample schools. Given the relatively low reported rates
of sexting in recent data for the youngest age cohort (11–12) we decided to sample our students from
year 8 (12–13) and year 10 (14–15) to develop an exploratory sense of the differences in young people’s
experiences over this relatively short period of physical, psychological and social change.
Table 1: Sample
School
School One School Two
Year 8 Year 10 Year 8 Year 10
Gender
Male 4 4 5 5
Female
Ethnicity
4 3 5 5
Black and minority ethnic 6 5 8 4
White 2 2 2 6
Total 8 7 10 10
semi structured focus group interviews with students
We interviewed 35 young people in single sex focus groups of 2–5 people to explore their experiences of
sexual content online in a group context.
There were differences in the sampling methods used to compose the focus groups at each school site.
We asked schools to select a diverse sample of students in years 8 and 10 based on their knowledge of the
student population. Students at School Two were selected from those who volunteered to take part in
the study. In order to be eligible to take part, students were required to have experience of using online
or mobile technologies.
Students at School One were selected to take part by the heads of year 8 and 10, based on their knowledge
of the student population at the school. This meant that our sample included a wide range of students
20