Conference Agenda

Relevance & Research Question: Online sexual activities (OSA) are quite common nowadays although still with a male domination and mostly male directed content. But the countermovement is growing. There is pornography especially created for women and there are clear efforts and projects to empower women to enhance their sexuality using online content (eg. OMGYes, a website for women to embrace their sexuality and learn how to have better orgasms).Gender differences in Online Sexual Activities (OSA) seem to decrease over the last years (eg Döring et al, 2017)

Objectives of the presented study was to evaluate a gender balanced sample according to their OSA and clinical aspects such as sexual and internet addiction.

Methods & Data: A sample of 93 online pornography users (51.6% male and 48.4% female) based on postings in pornography related online-groups was surveyed in a cross-sectional design using an online questionnaire including questions about sexual preferences in real life and online as well as several clinical scales such as the Internet Sex Screening Test (ISST, Delmonico, 1997) the abbreviated version of the Sex Addiction Screening Test (SAST-A, Carnes, 1989 accrevated by Delmonico & Miller, 2003) and the Internet Addiction Scale (ISS-20R, Hahn, Jerusalem & Meixner-Dahle, 2014).

Results: Males show on average significantly more problematic online behaviour than females (ISST: T(69.756)=3.823,p<.001) and use online pornography significantly more hours per week (T(41.685)=3.729,p=.001). Women report that they have changed their preferences since consuming online sexual content significantly more than men (T(89.993)=-2.153,p=.034). In addition to that analysis of the proposed ISST factors (Delmonico & Miller, 2003), which only use several items to explain the online sexual behaviour in depth shows that female participants showed significantly more interest in online sexual behaviours (T(71.149)=-3.456,p=.001) show more online sexual compulsivity (T(56.761)=-3.631,p=.001) and more isolated online sexual behaviour (T(85)=-2.965,p=.004).

Added Value: A shift in preferences of women is visible in the current sample. Future studies focusing on womens OSA in a more specific way need to reveal if there is a real trend

Relevance & Research Question (Keywords: online community; content analysis):

Social support from peers plays a positive and important role in maternal well-being, previous studies show that lack of social support presents a strong risk factor for maternal depression during pregnancy and the postpartum period which can also impair the mental health of the next generation. Today, the emergence of online social communities provides possibility to seek social support to maternity from a much broader context. Our paper, through text mining of an online community, investigates whether dual peer group membership has positive effects on members social support behavior during pregnancy.

Methods & Data (Keywords: quasi-experimental design; instrumental variable):

We collect a sample data set from the largest online maternity and parenting community in China, www.babytree.com (Babytree), which contains over 30,000 pregnant women and over 600,000 online posts in our sample. We use an instrumental variable approach and therefore design a quasi-experiment to explore the effects of dual membership on social support behavior in this online community. We instrument the enrollment of peer groups by the day of users’ estimated due date, which allows a causal interpretation of our results.

Results (Keywords: spillover effects):

We find that the enrollment of an additional peer group of the previous month has positive spillovers on users’ outgoing social support in their default peer group. Channels of knowledge transfer and reciprocity are discussed with suggestive evidence and related policy implications.

Added Value (Keywords: social support; pregnancy; maternity; health):

Our contribution uses a massive set of online data to explore the social support behavior among pregnant women in China. It is an unprecedented scale with rich text information only made possible by recent online technologies. The positive spillover of online interaction with multiple membership will also have significant implications for other virtual or real social platforms.