As a father of four children, Rosen is glad that his teenagers have access to a safe venue to socialize, albeit a virtual one.
“My generation used to go hang out in places like a hobby shop or bowling alley,” he says. “Kids today can’t do that, so they hang out on MySpace. I look at it as a venue to do what all teenagers are trying to do, figure out who they are. They get a lot of their adolescent needs met online, such as socialization, and they get a way to test the world, which is a lot easier on MySpace. They can be someone different if they want, they can post something controversial and see how people react. So they get a lot of socialization experience that they don’t necessarily get any place else.”
Cheever points out, however, that the researchers found a correlation between the behavior of some teens who used MySpace frequently and a lack of socialization.
“I think it might be a matter of being on the computer for a long period of time, maybe not just necessarily MySpace use,” she says. “We did find out that people who tend to use it a lot also tend to experience more social isolation, depression and other issues.”
In relation to teens using MySpace to discover and invent themselves, Rosen points out that a lot of teens use the site to carefully test the waters in announcing their homosexuality or bisexuality.
“Being on MySpace lets you practice things that you’re not sure how to present in person, so that when you do see your friends face-to-face, you’ve already tried it out on them,” he says. “The literature shows that kids are coming out much younger than ever before and they will make allusions to homosexuality or bisexuality online and see how people react, rather than doing it in person.”
The researchers gathered data by surveying teens and parents in pairs. Cheever says that this has never been done before, and afforded the team the opportunity to compare the subjects’ responses to the same questions. Interestingly, the teen/parent answers agreed for the most part, especially in the area of parenting styles.
Another aspect they examined was the perceived abundance of sexual predators online. According to Cheever, only 15 percent of the entire teen sample had ever been contacted by someone with an unwanted sexual motive and 90 percent of them dealt with it appropriately.
“The perception of rampant sexual predators is such a hot topic in the media right now,” she notes. “With the way the media portrays it, it seems like predators are rampant on the Internet and all the kids are being stalked. While it happened to a few people, they told their parents about it, they blocked the person from their page; they told the person to go away or simply ignored them. The kids know how to deal with it, which is really encouraging.”
Cheever and Rosen’s next research project will be an examination of the dependence of consumers on peer reviews on the Internet.
“People seem to trust their peers more,” says Rosen. “They don’t trust experts because they think they are biased or written by somebody with a vested interest as opposed to somebody like them.
Cheever’s research has included studies of television’s effect on women’s self-perception and on the development of children. She is currently taking an unprecedented look at the influence of mixed martial arts on its predominantly male audience. (live link: http://www.csudh.edu/
A widely quoted commentator on the effects of technology on the human psyche, Rosen has co-authored TechnoStress:
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Located in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, California State University, Dominguez Hills is the most diverse of the CSU campuses, and according to U.S. News & World Report, one of the most diverse in the west among universities offering bachelor’s and master’s degrees. CSUDH offers 43 undergraduate majors and 23 master’s degrees as well as multiple subject and single subject teaching credentials. On the campus is the Home Depot Center, a multi-purpose sports complex that hosts world-class soccer, tennis, track and field, lacrosse and cycling. http://www.csudh.edu
