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A new study suggests that parents and health-care professionals can use social-networking sites to curb risky teen behavior.
Jan 5, 2009
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For adults, browsing MySpace.com can be a secret window onto how teenagers sculpt their public personas. Teens, one of the most wired groups in America, use the social-networking site to create profiles where they share clips of their favorite songs, post pictures or vent about a bad day.
But MySpace, which now boasts 200 million profiles, is not all fun and games. Findings from a new pair of studies by Megan Moreno, a physician specializing in adolescent medicine, and her colleagues at Seattle Children's Hospital reveal that more than half of the 500 teen profiles they looked at during two and a half months in 2007, read more like cautionary tales, chock full of high-risk behaviors from sexual conquests to binge drinking and drug use. While the prevalence of racy MySpace pages created by teens may not be news, Moreno's studies are the first to systematically catalog the sexual and substance-abuse content of teens' profiles, and to look at the results of an online health intervention. Her results, on a small scale, support the idea that these profiles are an untapped resource for physicians and mental-health professionals. By harnessing this technology as a monitoring tool, physicians, parents and counselors may effectively tag along with teens for some of their social interactions and when appropriate, contact teens at risk.
For the purposes of the study, published Monday in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, researchers staged a sort of online intervention and looked at whether it had any impact on teens. Moreno created a MySpace listing for "Dr. Meg," listed her credentials as a medical professional, and contacted 190 of the teens with risqué profiles. She selected users registered as 18- to 20-year-olds (though many of them were clearly younger), and sent them all a basic message with information about the risky nature of online personal disclosures. She also directed teens to a Web site about sexual health and information on STD testing.
Three months later the researchers found more than a dozen of these teens had eliminated all sexual references on their profiles—more than double the number of sexual reference removals from a comparison group of teens who were not contacted. A handful of the contacted subjects e-mailed Moreno and told her they hadn't known what their "public" status had truly entailed and changed their status to "private." A couple of others told her to mind her own business. Most said nothing at all. Even if the wild behavior these teens are writing about is grounded more in fantasy than reality, law-enforcement and safety advocates have long warned that advertising these behaviors puts kids at risk from online predators looking for vulnerable youths. Parents also worry that some of the allusions to drug use and more compromising photos of teens with alcohol may hamper their teens' future efforts when they apply to college or a job.
To some extent, MySpace does limit public access to profiles of minors, but Moreno says that the site's safety features, like requiring users to have profiles set to private if they register as 14-or 15-year-olds can be easily circumvented. Out of 500 teens claiming to be 18 years old, Moreno found 50 who revealed that they were younger elsewhere on their sites, and many more had pictures or comments that suggested they were underage even if it wasn't explicitly stated. Moreno's team says that the goal of their work is not to monitor the hundreds of thousands of minors on social networks but rather to explore the feasibility of targeted outreach by professionals or parents to teens at risk.
For this particular study, the kids were chosen from Washington, D.C.'s Anacostia neighborhood, one of the poorest in the nation. "We wanted to reach a group that is difficult to contact by conventional public-health methods," Moreno explains. Coauthor Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician at Seattle Children's Hospital, attributes much of the decrease in contacted teens' sexual references to the fact that the kids were embarrassed. Teens are used to positive reinforcement from their friends for this kind of behavior and the intervention e-mail was probably a rare moderating influence, he says.
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