Consuming New Communication Media and the Attitude towards the Relationship with the Opposite Sex (Case Study: the Youths of Behbahan, Iran)

The spread of modern broadcasting and communicating media encouraging specific attitudes and beliefs about the relationship between boys and girls has provided the basis for concerns and has raised some individual, social, and cultural issues regarding the quantity and quality of the relationship between the two sexes. But the extent to which these media really influence young people's heterosexual orientation has not yet been empirically examined. This paper is the result of a research carried out in 2015 using a quantitative method and survey technique through a researcher-made questionnaire to experimentally investigate the relationship between consuming new communication media and heterosexual orientation in a sample of 387 youths in Behbahan, Iran. The method of stratified random sampling was proportional to volume by gender and data analysis tool was SPSS 22 software for heuristic, correlation, and multivariate regression analysis. Our research findings showed that the boys' and girls' internet dating, watching satellite channels, and interactive use of mobile phones had the highest positive and significant correlation with the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional dimensions of their tendency to have relationship with the opposite sex. According to these findings, it was not the internet service consumption in general, but the type of the service consumed, that determined their heterosexual orientation. Also, the entertainment aspects of watching satellite channels and the individual and interactive dimensions of using mobile phones had the highest positive and significant correlation with their tendency to have such a relationship. Finally, the findings showed that using different new communication media did not equally affect the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral dimensions of the respondents' heterosexual orientation.