Sending photos with erotic or sexual content, risky or harmless? Validation of a sexting scale with high school students in Colombia

Sending, receiving and forwarding photos, videos or messages with explicit or implicit sexual content, known as sexting, is increasingly frequent among adolescents. This research aims to validate the sexting scale in high school students and to estimate its prevalence. Content validity was determined by expert judgment and construct validity was determined by Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The exploratory analysis was performed with approximately 40% of the sample (n = 565) and showed two factors explaining 72% of the variance, called "behaviors and consequences of sexting". The confirmatory, with almost 60%, employed the maximum likelihood method for parameter estimation. Two first-order factors were found that confirm the underlying structure of the data, as well as a good fit for the two-dimensional model formed by the items that explored receiving (22.8%), sending (14.7%) and forwarding photos or videos (15.9%) and the consequences of having sent those photos (seven items), among which embarrassment (12.9%), threat of publishing the photo (10.1%) and publication or dissemination of the video (10.3%) stood out. In conclusion, the validated sexting scale is a useful measurement tool to strengthen studies on this phenomenon.