Is pornography a risk for adolescent academic achievement? findings from two longitudinal studies of male adolescents

ABSTRACT

A recent longitudinal study reported a negative association between the use of sexually explicit materials (SEM) and academic achievement among early adolescent Belgian boys. Given that academic achievement is related to the attainment of future educational and professional goals, these results suggest that SEM use may have long-term adverse outcomes. To explore whether the same effect persists in middle adolescence, the present study used two independent longitudinal samples of Croatian male adolescents (Rijeka: n = 355, M_age = 15.9 at baseline; and Zagreb: n = 205, M_age = 16.1 at baseline). Following the original study, the target association was explored using path analysis. SEM use did not predict a change in students’ academic performance in either panel. However, a negative baseline association between the use of online social networking sites and school grades was significant across panels. The failure to replicate the findings reported by the Belgian longitudinal study indicates that the association between SEM use and boys’ academic achievement, if it exists, does not extend to middle adolescence.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescents
• pornography
• academic achievement
• longitudinal design

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ A relatively high percentage of unlinked participants was most likely due to a combination of truancy (on average, 6.5 students per class seemed to be absent from school at each wave) and errors in filling out the alphanumeric linking code used in the study.

² We refer to school clustering in the Zagreb panel (no information about classes was collected) and clustering within classes in the Rijeka panel (the number of schools in Rijeka, 14, was judged to be too low for a meaningful higher-level analysis; Bickel, 2007). A multilevel assessment confirmed a significant intraclass correlation in both panels (ICC r_Rijeka = .16 and r_Zagreb = .27).

³ Following the original path analytic model (see Beyens et al., 2015), we omitted a covariance between baseline SEM use and academic achievement levels. When added to the model, the covariance failed to reach statistical significance (p = .147) and did not affect model fit.

⁴ Considering that national cultures often differ in social norms that regulate sexuality (Agocha, Asencio, & Decena, 2014), is it possible that our failure to replicate the Belgian study reflects cultural differences? Given that Croatia is less sexually permissive and more religious than Belgium (Apahideanu, 2013; Štulhofer & Rimac, 2009), our results contradict expectations of a higher frequency of SEM use in a more sexually permissive culture, as well as of higher risks of negative SEM-related outcomes in a less sexually permissive cultural setting (Hald, Seaman, & Linz, 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Hrvatska Zaklada za Znanost [9221];