Adolescents' Perceived Usefulness of Information on Sexuality: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Interpersonal Sources, Professional Sources and the Mass Media

Abstract

The study examines the usefulness of interpersonal sources, professional sources and the mass media in providing information on sexuality, as it is perceived in the eyes of Israeli adolescents from three ethnic groups: Jews, Moslem-Arabs and Christian-Arabs. Peers, television, internet and newspapers and magazines are perceived as the most useful sources, but—regardless of ethnicity—all of the sources are perceived as moderately useful at best. Compared to Jews, Arabs perceive nearly all of the sources as more useful, but there are no major differences between Moslems and Christians. In comparison with males, females perceive their parents as more useful and the electronic media as less useful, but there are no signs of a consistent gender-ethnicity interaction. A comparison of this study's results with the findings of American research indicates that the ranking of sources according to their usefulness differs across cultures.

The author would like to thank Lilach Ifrach, Moran Greenstein and Maurice Awabdy for assisting with the data collection and the Yezreel Valley College Research Fund for a $1,000 grant.Indebtedness goes to the reviewers and editor of the journal for providing the most insightful comments.

Notes

¹The questionnaire used the same items when asking about the usefulness of newspapers and magazines, as previous studies did (see Sutton et al., 2002). The reason is that in most cases adolescents' perception of the press does not make the distinction between daily newspapers, magazines and periodicals (Strasburger & Wilson, 2002).)