Revealing and Receiving Sexual Health Information

ABSTRACT

This investigation applies communication privacy management theory to examine sexual health disclosures from the perspectives of disclosers and confidants. A Qualtrics survey distributed through Amazon Mechanical Turk yielded 161 participants who disclosed sexual health information to a partner and 130 who received a disclosure. Accounts of the conversations were analyzed with content analysis to describe the linkage rules of the disclosures. Motivation to reveal or conceal, risks and benefits, and gender hypotheses and research questions were ascertained using descriptive statistics and tests of difference. Linkage rules for the majority of participants indicate that disclosures are made in a straightforward style before a sexual episode or on the day of diagnosis. Disclosures were perceived to be of above average quality and resulted in increased relational closeness. Tentative results suggest there may be disclosure differences based on privacy orientation. There were no significant differences based on type of diagnosis or gender.

Notes

1. Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are two different categories for medical diagnoses, yet the acronyms are frequently used interchangeably by non-medical persons or in the vernacular. In this manuscript, we use STD or STI in cited sources, according to the original source’s terminology. In our writing, we frequently use sexual health to clarify that we include both types of diagnoses, among others, such as lice or scabies.

2. This study samples MTurk participants because “[they] are more demographically diverse than standard Internet samples and significantly more diverse than typical American college samples” (Buhrmester et al., 2011, p. 4). MTurk advantages include affordability and access to a large, diverse pool (Mason & Suri, 2012) and more reliable performance relative to attention checks than other sampling methods (Casler, Bickel, & Hackett, 2013). MTurk has a greater percentage of nonwhite and older participants than collegiate samples.

3. Ten participants (6%) with lice/scabies/other were included in this test.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by funding from the Central States Communication Association’s Federation Prize.