Social media policy for graduate students: Challenges and opportunities for professional psychology training programs.

Abstract

The use of social media has undoubtedly proliferated in the past 20 years and has become a common way that people communicate and connect with one another (Williams, Johnson, & Patterson, 2013). Social media is a broad term that is defined as websites that use collaborative virtual applications that enable the creation, exchange, and broadcasting of online user generated (Pham, 2014) and includes social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, MySpace), content sharing (e.g., YouTube, Flickr, Instagram), web chat/discussion (e.g., Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Skype), microblogging (e.g., Twitter, Tumblr), and livestreaming (e.g., Lifestream). Social media use is particularly common amongst college/university students, with 85-90% of students reporting regular social media use (Caruso & Salaway, 2007; Dahlstrom, de Boor, Grunwald, & Vockley, 2011) and 81-91% of psychology graduate students reporting personal profiles on social networking sites (Lehavot, Barnett, & Powers, 2010; Taylor, McMinn, Bufford, & Chang, 2010). As Canadians have the highest social media network penetration in the world (with 82% of the population using a social network compared to only 75% of Americans; Mckinnon, 2014), it is reasonable to assume that a large majority of Canadian psychology graduate students are using social media.For psychologists-in-training, social media offers a number of advantages such as the dissemination of information, opportunities for professional development, advertising, and a forum for advocacy (Myers, Endres, Ruddy, & Zelikovsky, 2012), and a new ease with which to communicate with colleagues, network with others, and share information (Lehavot et al., 2010). Despite these numerous advantages, this online medium also poses a number of ethical dilemmas such as concerns about privacy and confidentiality, issues with credibility of information, unintended self-disclosure, and unacknowledged dual relationships. Additional ethical or potentially legal complications can arise associated with safety issues, confidentiality, and a duty to report dangerous activities related to the potential harm of self or others (Myers et al., 2012).The popularity of social media use amongst psychology graduate students, coupled with its ethical and professional complexities, make social media an important training and policy issue for Canadian professional psychology programs. The purpose of this article is to (a) highlight the need for social media policy in professional psychology training programs; (b) examine the content and nature of existing social media policies in Canadian training programs; and (c) summarize the policy-related challenges and opportunities relevant to social media use by psychologistsin-training.A Need for Social Media PolicyAlthough this is a developing area of research, there is evidence to suggest that social media misuse is common amongst health professional trainees, including psychology graduate students. This misuse at minimum suggests there is a significant training need regarding the ethical and professional issues surrounding social media use; however cohort differences between trainees and supervisors and a lack of procedural guidelines in this area suggest that formalized social media policy would be beneficial to trainees, supervisors, and training programs. For example, a survey of medical schools in the United States found that 60% of deans admitted to experiencing incidents of students posting unprofessional content online such as violation of confidentiality, sexually suggestive content, discriminatory language, profanity, and depictions of intoxication (Chretien, Greysen, Chretien, & Kind, 2009). Forty percent of marriage and family counselling programs in Canada and the United States had experienced a problem with student's inappropriate use of social media (Williams et al., 2013). A salient issue is that of unintentional personal disclosure, which involves the risk that personal information will be viewed by unintended recipients (Zur, Williams, Lehavot, & Knapp, 2009). …