Abstract
Social networking sites (SNS) provide adolescents with opportunities for content generation on a wide range of social issues, providing unique insight into the psychosocial development of adolescence. We explored SNS webpages viewed by a random sample of adolescents during the initial uptake of SNS use (2005) to describe their general language use. Adolescents aged 14 to 17 with home Internet access were recruited using list-assisted random digit dialing methods. All SNS (MySpace) webpages viewed by participants were captured, and a large, structured set of texts (text corpus) was created from the profiles and message boards therein. Using concordance software, word frequency and keyword associations were analyzed. The 346 participants viewed approximately 28,000 MySpace pages, yielding a 1,147,432-word text corpus. Profile sections presented information about the content creator, while message boards focused more on short conversations with recipients. The most common content word was the term love. Profile owners would profess their love for activities, such as dancing, partying, or shopping, followed by their love for family, friends, and significant others. SNS offer teens an opportunity to describe and share feelings about people, places, and things connected to a range of activities and social contacts within their online and offline environments. Better understanding of SNS can offer strategies to adolescents and health care providers for insight into what connects young people in a community.
Highlights
Almost all teens (95%) aged 12 to 17 in the United States use the Internet, and 80% of those online teens are users of social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook or MySpace (Lenhart et al, 2011)
Despite the popularity and potential benefits of social networking, concern has been raised over information sharing and the language used by adolescents on SNS, with regard to their display of health risk behaviors, such as alcohol consumption and tobacco use (e.g., Jenssen, Klein, Salazar, Daluga, & DiClemente, 2009; Moreno et al, 2010a; Moreno, Brockman, Rogers, & Christakis, 2010b; Moreno, Parks, & Richardson, 2007; Moreno, Parks, Zimmerman, Brito, & Christakis, 2009)
To describe the linguistic features of MySpace language content, a text corpus was created from the profile and message board sections from all MySpace pages viewed by 346 adolescents aged 14 to 17 who participated in the Tracking Teen Trends (T3) study
Summary
Almost all teens (95%) aged 12 to 17 in the United States use the Internet, and 80% of those online teens are users of social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook or MySpace (Lenhart et al, 2011). Writing one’s experiences in a non-online setting can have positive health and social benefits, for example, reducing need for health care visits and improving grade point averages in college students (Pennebaker & Francis, 1996). Those who wrote about their deepest thoughts and feelings about going to college for the first time had better health outcomes than those who wrote on more superficial topics. Those students using positive emotion words had better outcomes than others in terms of physical health improvement
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