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Respondents’ preferred source of sexual information clearly pointed towards
professionals knowledgeable about sex and sexuality, be they sex educators, physicians
or counselors. In other words, it seemed that students had more trust in the information
provided by these trained professionals. However, when asked to indicate their main
source of such information, a little more than half of them (50.5%) said it was the media.
Parents hardly played a role here. Together, friends (11.6%), and self-learning (23.2%)
played a big part in this process, confirming the belief that the single-child society resorts
more to their peers rather than family in this regard.
However, our analysis did not indicate that media consumption was a significant
predictor of sexual awareness (H1), although half of the respondents suggested so.
Several reasons may account for this contradictory finding. First, even though media was
reportedly the main source, the amount of sexual information offered in the media might
not be enough to predict awareness. In other words, even though the Chinese media
began to offer such content, the doses were rather limited due to the Party control of the
media. Secondly, as revealed by the literature (Gunter, 2002), interactions with families,
authorities, and friends, besides the media, all helped to predict sexual awareness.
Arguably then, specific interpersonal communication can be a moderator of sexual
awareness. Thirdly, we realized that we did not measure sexual knowledge directly.
Rather, we measured sexual awareness. The two concepts might overlap. But they were
not identical. Sexual awareness related more to individual characteristics, while
knowledge existed in spite of personalities.
The results on attitudes towards the pornographic material illustrated a seemingly
paradoxical picture, with 80.3% agreeing that the pornographic materials have harmful
Convention