Original ArticlePrevalence of tattooing and body piercing in Germany and perception of health, mental disorders, and sensation seeking among tattooed and body-pierced individuals
Section snippets
Introduction: surveys on tattooing and body piercing
Body piercing is defined as “a penetration of jewelry into openings made in such body areas as eyebrows, ears, lips, tongue, nose, navel, nipples, and genitals” [1], [2]; piercing of the earlobes is deliberately excluded from this definition. Tattooing, on the other hand, is defined as “an invasive procedure in which pigment is introduced into the skin by multiple punctures to produce an indelible decorative design” [3]. Both are contemporary practices intended to create a lasting body
Study participants
This study is based on a representative survey of the German population recruiting a total of 2043 respondents aged between 14 and 93 years. Data were collected during the annual survey of the University of Leipzig Department of Medical Psychology and Medical Sociology on health behavior and health perception by the USUMA-Berlin (Independent Service for Surveys, Methods, and Analyses) based on 210 sample points in Germany. Households and the target person in each household were selected with
Prevalence of tattooing and body piercing in the German population
Of the 2043 sampled subjects, 8.5% were tattooed and 6.8% were body pierced. Looking into the relevant sample of respondents aged between 14 and 44 years, the prevalence of tattooing was 15% and that of body piercing was 14%. There was no significant difference in mean age between the tattooed and nontattooed respondents (32 vs. 30 years). Both groups were roughly as often in a partnership (51% vs. 48%). Body-pierced respondents, however, were significantly younger in mean age (26 years) and
Prevalence
The prevalence of tattooing and especially body piercing is particularly pronounced in individuals aged between 14 and 24 years (38% of the female respondents were body pierced; 22% of the male respondents were tattooed). One reason for this is the recency of the fashion-motivated phenomenon that may be triggered by the urge to fit in with one's peers.
Sensation-seeking behavior
The “recency factor” could also account for the finding that sensation-seeking behavior is significantly higher among the body-modified subjects
Acknowledgments
Besides being financed through the regular household budgets of the University of Leipzig, there was no additional outside funding.
We thank Peter van Ham, Pat Agre, and Wolf Singer for their valuable comments on the manuscript and Irmi Pipacs for editorial assistance.
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