TY - JOUR
T1 - Language and Love
T2 - Generation Y Comes of Age Online
AU - Jenssen, Brian P.
AU - Gray, Nicola J.
AU - Harvey, Kevin
AU - DiClemente, Ralph J.
AU - Klein, Jonathan D.
N1 - Funding Information:
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors received financial support by the AAP Julius B. Richmond Center of Excellence, funded by the Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute, and grant R01-CA140676 from the National Cancer Institute.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2014.
PY - 2014/2/25
Y1 - 2014/2/25
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - adolescence
KW - assets
KW - corpus linguistics
KW - MySpace
KW - resilience
KW - social networking sites
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85047042435&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/2158244014525894
DO - 10.1177/2158244014525894
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85047042435
VL - 4
SP - 1
EP - 8
JO - SAGE Open
JF - SAGE Open
SN - 2158-2440
IS - 1
ER -