Media Illiteracy and its Implications on Sexual permissiveness and Unrealistic Couple Goals among University Students in Tanzania

ABSTRACT

The effect of media illiteracy on adolescents’ and youths’ mental growth is underrated in most of the developing countries. Notwithstanding, media influences almost everything in today’s life among adolescents and youths. Early sexual debut, time balance between academics and dating issues, and unrealistic expectations from partners continue to cause endless cries among dating adolescents and youths. This study explored the effect of media illiteracy among adolescents and youths on three behaviors; learning engagement in higher education, setting dating or couple goals, and sexual attitudes and behavior. From a total of 1037 (66.2% male and 33.8% female) valid questionnaire responses, the results indicated that adolescents and youths are major victims of media misinformation, obstructing them from accessing the factual truth about intimacy and sexuality. Media illiteracy negatively affects decisions about sexual intimacy and related behaviors. Adolescents’ and youths’ sexual permissiveness is prejudiced by lack of skills, knowledge, and understanding of how to decipher credible information from social media platforms. Conclusively, media literacy is essential to access and identify authentic information for different purposes, especially for decisions on sexuality and intimacy. Benefits are immense only if an accurate intellectual framework is cultivated to find, understand, evaluate and use information from various media platforms properly.

KEYWORDS:

• Media illiteracy
• sexual-permissiveness
• dating
• unrealistic dating goals
• academic engagement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).