The methodology of the survey is somewhat weak. Snapchat has only been popular for about a year, whereas sexting has been common for 5+ years now. Not only does this mean that users have had a much longer time to sext via SMS than snapchat, but because it's a self-reported survey it's even worse; users are much more likely to admit to something the longer ago it happened in the past, which skews the data even further. It would have been much better to ask users whether they had sexted within the past six months or whatever.
Good point. We had the same thought and did consider running a survey variant with the fixed 6 mo time frame. And we may just give it a try to see how the results are affected.
Even with the current wording, I find the SMS comparison useful. It demonstrates that people are willing to admit to sexting in the anonymous Survata survey format. I like your hypothesis about greater willingness to admit to "bad behavior" in the distant past than in the recent past. My intuition is that anonymity weakens that effect, but we'll have to measure to know for certain.
"I like your hypothesis about greater willingness to admit to "bad behavior" in the distant past than in the recent past. My intuition is that anonymity weakens that effect, but we'll have to measure to know for certain."
If you look at this report on the validity of self-reported drug use, it goes into the issue of how people are more likely to admit bad behavior that happened long ago. Anonymity probably does ameliorate the problem, but I'm guessing that it would still be significant.
Great link—thanks for posting it—too few people cite the sources for their beliefs. In a related context, "Truth and consequences: using the bogus pipeline to examine sex differences in self-reported sexuality" discusses how "some of the sex differences in self-reports of sexuality are not due to actual sex differences in behavior, but rather to differences in reporting as a function of differential normative expectations for men and women": http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Truth+and+consequences%3a+usin... .
Not just the operationalization of relevant variables, also the analysis of the data is lacking. There are some very standard and boring methods to get a much clearer idea of whether there actually is a difference and also to more clearly look at interaction effects (between, say, age, gender and behavior).
It seems to reason that people who use SnapChat for sexting are doing so to hide the fact that they're sexting, so they might be less likely to admit to it (even on an anonymous survey). Someone who uses text messaging may feel less compelled to hide it at all. This would be especially true for kids (under 18) since you also ask the age on the survey.
Not sure how big a role this might actually play in the results.
OP here.
Thanks for the feedback.
We only surveyed respondents 18+ for this survey. We agree kids under 18 would have been more likely to lie about this type of behavior.
I've read of a technique where for self-reported statistics you mix in a non-pertinent question with a known probability, using Bayes to extract the original prior probability.
For example, instead of asking kids "do you smoke pot?" you ask that of 80% of people and the other 20% get "do you own a dog?"; the surveyor has no idea which question was asked but knows the overall population of dog owners.
Does this technique have a name that you know of and did you consider it?
I know of a method in which you give each respondent a coin and ask them to flip it in secret. If the coin lands heads, answer "Yes," if not, answer honestly. Then, if you ask a question like "Have you sexted?" or "Do you use drugs?", you may get survey results that look like 60% yes and 40% no. You subtract 50% from the yes count to account for the coin toss and get accurate overall results, but the participants have plausible deniability.
However, I can't remember the name of it, nor the article I read about it, and Google isn't helping.
Interesting. I imagine this method would be particularly helpful for non-anonymized surveys.
Obviously, this would only be helpful if you don't have a good idea of how many people would lie in the first place. It also depends on the assumption that people won't lie given this plausible deniability.
The biggest problem I see is that this could only increase the variance of your survey results. The way I see it you have three binomial distributions base on three random variables:
1. The number of people who would answer yes to the survey question if they were honest.
2. The number of people who lied. (This is clearly not independent to the first random variable)
3. The number of people who flipped heads. (This clearly is independent)
The problem is that coin flipping has the highest possible variance of any binomial distribution for any given sample size. So even if the variance created by people lying is completely eliminated, it would be more than counteracted by the variance introduced by the coin flipping.
I still really like this method since the increased variance is a moot point if giving people plausible deniability is the best way to normalize for lying. And you can always increase your confidence in the resulting proportion by increasing your sample size.
It would be interesting to run anonymized and non-anonymized surveys with the coin flip and without to try to determine how much anonymization reduces lying on various survey questions.
One nitpick: You should subtract 50% from the yes count and then multiply by two. So in your example, you would expect that 20% of those surveyed truly sexted or use drugs.
You are referring to a "randomized response" survey[1]. There are also list experiments and endorsement experiments for eliciting responses to sensitive questions[2].
No way I'm trusting this informal survey unless they have a plausible, data-backed explanation for the supposed huge gender disparity in sexting.
The only halfway plausible explanation is that the 3.4% of men who are gay or bi all sext with each other. In other words, a large number of the respondents lied and the data is invalid.
That said, anecdotal evidence (the people I talk do every day) strongly indicates that people are in fact occasionally using Snapchat for other things than sexting
That's one of the first things that we (I'm a Survata co-founder) noted in seeing the data too.
I see a few possible explanations:
(1) A woman who sexts could have multiple sexting partners. In the extreme, you could have every man in the world sext with one woman, making the male sexting prevalence 100% and the female near 0.
(2) While we defined sexting as "sending or receiving", some respondents may interpret the question as primarily about sending. There could be a gender bias in the sending vs receiving of sexts.
(3) As you point out, the data is reported behavior and not observed behavior. Reported behavior often is a good proxy for observed behavior, but it is not perfect. And there are known to be effects where certain demographics answer questions dishonestly for conscious or unconscious reasons. Perhaps women are less willing to admit to sexting behavior.
Hasn't prior research established that men on average overstate sexual experience and women on average understate? I think I've seen this come up in surveys of number of partners and frequency, so it doesn't surprise me at all that it would happen in sexting surveys.
Even assuming all of the participants are being truthful, you'll have some problems with definitions not being shared by the participants. The classic example is "Does oral sex count?" Men, for whom a large number of partners is (sometimes) culturally good, may be inclined to count it. Women, for whom a large number of partners is (sometimes) culturally bad, might not count it.
With respect to sexting, imagine a woman sends a man a picture of herself in a low-cut dress. The man might say, "she was totally sexting me", and believe it, the woman might say, "I was fully dressed in an outfit seen by hundreds of people at a party, how can that be sexting?", and believe it.
In the case of systematic lying it'd be hard, but when the problem is definitions -- what counts as sex and sexting -- you just need to ask more and more detailed questions and then the reasons become obvious.
I actually found that piece the funniest, and anecdotally after living with 4 women, I expected it. A case I see is a mixture of more Bi/Gay men sexting each other (than Bi/Lesbian women), plus a lot of men either attempting to sex with women (who do not sext back) or sexting with the same smaller subset of women.
> Frequently cited uses were to “send funny pictures to my friends” or “make silly faces for my friends” or “send jokes to my friends.”
I don't mean to be a grumpy old man, but this seems even more pointless than usual. If it's not being used for sexual photos, then it's surely a fad that's going to die in a few months.
All that other crap can be done via normal messaging; there's precious little reason to use Snapchat except that it's (briefly, for now) the popular new thing.
Call me crazy, but it seems to me that Snapchat solves an actual need: namely, that users want to be uninhibited in being social, but don't necessarily want a paper trail of all their crazy, goofy, drunk, sexy, etc., behavior following them around.
This doesn't necessarily mean that sexting is the only legitimate use case, or even the predominant use case. Rather, I see as the use case pretty much anything that people want to share via SMS, or even on Facebook -- but don't want to remain up for long, or be seen accidentally by undesired audiences (parents, co-workers, friends who are outside the specific loop, etc.).
Snapchat is sort of like social networking as pointcasting, rather than social networking as broadcasting.
You're missing the point. People are realizing that it's probably not a good idea to have every pic you ever take be out there for the world to see. But they still want to share them with certain people. They (rightfully) don't trust other people to delete them (or lose there phone, etc.) and they don't trust the privacy settings of facebook and the like. Given that, having a mechanism for sending a pic and (almost) guaranteeing it is deleted is a compelling use case. Snapchat could certainly fail, but I think the general use case will be enduring.
Think of it as having a picture or video conversation in <10 second clips. I don't think that is a fad. That is just a slick form of communication for something that was slightly annoying to do.
This is where Snapchat does extremely well. It makes the act of sending a picture or video as frictionless as possible. I've never sent a video through MMS, but I've probably sent over 200 Snapchat videos.
It's not like sending an MMS with video or pictures is hard, it just isn't as dead simple as using Snapchat.
Another thing people like to harp on is the fact that people can take screenshots, thus "defeating the purpose." Fair point, but I think people who say this haven't really used Snapchat and don't really get why it is so sticky.
Sure, one of my friends may screenshot a silly face pic I send, but that's happened maybe 10 times out of the 4k+ snaps I've sent. The fact is I know I am not leaving a huge digital trail compared to using SMS/MMS, FB, GroupMe, etc.
Even if the system isn't perfect, it is good enough for me to trust. And the whole interaction model encourages me to send more pics and videos than I would send to my friends before I used Snapchat. It's almost replaced text messaging for me. Why send a text to my friend that I'm hungover, when I can send an image or video with my tired looking face and overlay text and drawings. It's so much more expressive and interesting than a text.
Another reason I like Snapchat is that I don't keep in touch via SMS with a lot of my friends. I may text them only once a week or every couple of weeks, but with Snapchat, I may send them a pic of something funny a couple times a week. Snapchat has made sending pictures and videos as frictionless as possible, and has changed how I communicate with people (I'm serious here).
I don't mean to be a grumpy old man, but this seems even more pointless than usual.
To disagree with mmakunas, I don't think people care about the privacy angle so much- I think it's about creating something entirely disposable, and the freedom that gives you. It's like an anti-Instagram- no filters and perfectly positioned shots, just point, shoot, send.
I'm not sure what the exactly psychology of it is or whether it even matters that the photos disappear but a lot of teens use Snapchat. Just take a look at the demographics of a Twitter search:
Even if Snapchat doesn't do anything that normal messaging can't, they've clearly packaged it in such a way that it's tremendously popular. After all, if it was possible with normal messaging, why wasn't anyone doing it until Snapchat came about?
I think it's about creating something entirely disposable, and the freedom that
Part of that freedom comes from the level of privacy I think. But from looking at those tweets maybe I'm over estimating how people are explicitly thinking about privacy.
It just goes to show that is not always about creating something where the individual bits of functionality are new. Sometime the most compelling thing is putting a novel spin on what we already do and building a network of users around that.
I dunno. I haven't used it, but honestly, “make silly faces for my friends” seems a lot more plausible to me.
There's a lot of stuff -- really dirty/nasty jokes, really ugly faces, and I'm sure you can use your imagination -- that you would bring up in personal conversation but not really want to have an SMS or email recording of. Hell, I worked in an office where a particularly nasty-minded (in the most entertaining way) coworker of mine would send/forward me e-mails of all sorts, then come over and make sure I would delete them afterward.
Sexting is just a very small portion of all the kinds of messages people don't really want saved.
You appear to be looking for a rational explanation for why users of Snapchat are using Snapchat for what they claim to be using it for, when such an explanation might not exist.
Maybe it doesn't make a lot of sense to use Snapchat just for sending goofy pictures, but that doesn't mean it can't become popular for just that.
Thanks for your comment. We're constantly testing the accuracy of our network, and building technology to screen out respondents who are lying to us.
To date, the results are good. For example, when we ask respondents "Which time zone are you in?" or "Who is the president of the United State" we see around 97% accuracy. We see this as evidence of quality data.
I performed a few Google searches on Snapchat. I was very surprised to see the fanaticism around it being used by young people for Sexting alone. The above article paints a much different picture.
OP here.
Thanks for the feedback. We also asked respondents about sexting over text messaging, and got a similar rate (26%) to other studies about sexting[1].
Of course, as we note, this is entirely self-reported behavior and not observed behavior.
Wow, a lot of denial on this particular topic. Let's be real. Even facebook is used a lot for hookups. All mediums will have sex on them because we are sexual by nature. So of course this medium will be exploited fully and denied in public because it's a sensitive topic. Why dwell? Who cares? Are we such prudes?
And come on, just asking them? Go ask the guys in the head shop what kind of pipes they are selling. Tobacco pipes of course. But we didn't just fall off the turnip truck.
Can somebody explain to me what is stopping someone from hitting the power + home button simultaneously and creating a photo of whatever is in the screen effectively working around the "self destruct" nature of Snapchat?
I believe it detects the action and rats you out although it can't actually stop it. I don't use the app but there was a story recently on some people figuring out a way to evade detection.
I've received ~10 snapchats a day for the past month, and I have never received a sexting photo via snapchat. Instead my friends send pictures of: food, landscapes, people they are with, pets, etc...
Basically the point of Snapshot is to share mundane photos without the other person being able to share with their friends all the boring photos you send them throughout the day.
In terms of the comparison with SMS, this survey also seems to miss that sexting via text (words) is very different than sexting via snapchat (pictures). I'm sure a much higher percentage of the population is more comfortable with the former than latter, which doesn't make the comparison all that surprising.
It's common wisdom that Snapchat appeals particularly to those under the age of 18. This study focused only on "respondents aged 18 to 29".
What people (read: the media) really want to know is "are teens sexting with Snapchat?" Naturally, it's harder to get survey results for that demographic.
Not only. I just started using it a few weeks ago and I can say it has legitimate uses outside of sexting. The ability to write on an image or draw on it is quite useful.
imho there is something here with a neural correlate related to gambling, e.g. I send my mom/boss/teacher a funny face picture or I send my crush a love note with an expiration date and I can cash in on the thrill with a low chance of the risk of exposure
