Phenomenological pathology of adolescent girls' gender identity in cyberspace

In addition to face-to-face social interaction, the structure of gender identity in teenagers is influenced by new communication technologies, especially the Internet and virtual networks. Therefore, the current research was conducted with the aim of investigating the lived experiences of teenage girls from being in the virtual space and its effect on their gender identity. This study is of qualitative type and using phenomenology method and was conducted by using purposeful sampling and analysis of semi-structured interviews with girls aged 13 to 18 years old in Tehran. Finally, after conducting 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews, the researcher reached data saturation. Interviews were analyzed using Smith's method. In this research, 4 main themes and 9 sub-themes and 52 meaning units were obtained, the main themes were: "girls' behavioral changes", "access to early sexual information", "decrease in self-confidence", "gender identity disorder" ». According to the results obtained from this research, being more than 5 hours a day on virtual networks such as Instagram causes damage to the gender identity of teenage girls.