Today I found these links/sources (below), and maybe they will be informative. Teen wellness is an important topic, one that I do not know much about, so I thought I'd look for survey data. At first scan, I think these teen surveys address some of the things mentioned in this thread. However I haven't had the chance to read through carefully. All but one of the surveys report national samples. On teen ICT use and cyber-bullying (2006): http://attorneygeneral.utah.gov/PrRel/CyberBullies/Fight%20Crime%20Invest%20... "High Schoolers View the Future" (2005): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/artsandliving/HighSchoolNational.pdf "National Survey of American Attitudes on Substance Abuse IX: Teen Dating Practices and Sexual Activity" (August 2004): http://www.casacolumbia.org/pdshopprov/files/august_2004_casa_teen_survey.pd... Teen attitudes and perceptions in the Kansas City metro area (2004): http://www.pfc.org/PFC_KTS.pdf - Paul -------------- Paul DiPerna Blau Exchange http://www.blauexchange.org email: pdiperna@blauexchange.org Online ID: http://claimid.com/pdiperna -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Air-l] where did you go, out; what did you do, nothing From: danah boyd <aoir.z3z@danah.org> Date: Tue, January 23, 2007 4:02 pm To: Barry Wellman <wellman@chass.utoronto.ca> Cc: Paul DiPerna <pdiperna@blauexchange.org>, air-l@listserv.aoir.org Barry - I wish that i was talking about the exceptions but i've definitely seen problematic behavior across a variety of teens, far beyond the atypical. When i talk about self-destruction, i'm not talking about suicide. Amongst working class youth (primarily inner city and rural), it often comes out in the form of meth or alcohol abuse, sex for status or to get back at people, and in the some urban cases, gang communities providing the kinds of social stability that isn't present at home. In the wealthier communities, alcohol still persists (but meth dies off). Stress jumps through the roof (i've seen more kids with ulcers than i thought was possible). This is where you start getting eating disorders and cutting as mechanisms to gain control over one's life. I don't see that much potential suicide honestly. Amongst middle/upper class white kids who identify with emo culture, they talk about suicide, but no more than the goths did... they don't actually do it, just like with goths. I'm not doing quantitative work so i can't give you numbers but well over half of my subjects tell me something that just depresses me along these lines. The extreme behaviors are indeed extreme, but the spectrum is shifted too far into unhappy and dysfunctional land for me to be enjoying all of the time that i spend with teens. And i don't recruit for dysfunctional. Honestly, the atypical case in the hundreds of kids that i've talked to in the last four months across the US is a functional sane communicative relationship between parent and teen. That doesn't mean all kids are acting out of control. Some are terrified of their parents, some are terrified of not getting into college, some are quite religious (although a lot more attend church than are religious in the sense that they are not misbehaving because of it). But honestly, the lack of presence of parents across SES is just outright depressing. Single parents and dual-working parents are the primary issue. The wealthier fathers are just as absent as the working class shift work fathers (often because they work past 7PM in their white collar jobs and don't make it home to dinner). Parents are stressed and it shows through in the teens i talk with. (I should note that i'm not just seeing this amongst teens - i want to strangle half my colleagues in the tech industry who have young children, work on weekends, and don't go home until 8/9PM on weeknights and then wonder why their kids are acting strange and come to me for advice.) At a core, Barry and i do agree - most American teens do anything to avoid scrutiny but that doesn't mean that their choices don't terrify their parents. And it's this being terrified that results in lockdown that results in alienation and rebellion and cycle cycle cycle. .... As for studies... there are a bunch of us working on a large scale MacArthur Foundation Digital Youth Initiative. This will be qualitative studies of teens from tons of different angles. Personally, i will be formally interviewing over 200 teens from at least 6 different areas in the country (and i have informally talked to hundreds more from other regions). There are over 20 of us on one branch of that study and there are a number of other connected studies, including some quantitative work. I'm explicitly looking at technology use but i try to ground it by understanding what teens are doing more broadly. I would love to hear of other projects taking place. Obviously, there's PEW. And Larry Rosen has been surveying parent/teen relationships around tech and trust. danah On Jan 21, 2007, at 9:35 AM, Barry Wellman wrote:
My sense is that I was hypothesizing about the broad middle while danah is talking atypical cases. So both of us are right. Suicidal (or attempted suicidal) teens were big in my generation too. Hmn, should Romeo and Juliet have gone to couples therapy?
Barry Wellman _____________________________________________________________________
Barry Wellman S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology NetLab Director Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman for fun: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php _____________________________________________________________________