Personal information of adolescents on the Internet: A quantitative content analysis of MySpace.

By Sameer Hinduja, Justin W. Patchin. Journal des adolescens, 2008

406 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many youth have recently embraced online social networking sites such as MySpace (myspace.com) to meet their social and relational needs. While manifold benefits stem from participating in such web-based environments, the popular media has been quick to demonize MySpace even though an exponentially small proportion of its users have been victimized due to irresponsible or naive usage of the technology it affords. Major concerns revolve around the possibility of sexual predators and pedophiles finding and then assaulting adolescents who carelessly or unwittingly reveal identifiable information on their personal profile pages. The current study sought to empirically ascertain the type of information youth are publicly posting through an extensive content analysis of randomly sampled MySpace profile pages. Among other findings, 8.8% revealed their full name, 57% included a picture, 27.8% listed their school, and 0.3% provided their telephone number. When considered in its proper context, these results indicate that the problem of personal information disclosure on MySpace may not be as widespread as many assume, and that the overwhelming majority of adolescents are responsibly using the web site. Implications for Internet safety among adolescents and future research regarding adolescent Internet use are discussed.

Subfields: Communication, Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/084a04d1c6a0b8dc94ae8d1e80c6fb1ae0bd7e0d

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Citations in the corpus

The Role of Social Networking Sites in Early Adolescents’ Social Lives (2016, background): “Consequently, they are likely to turn to SNSs to meet new friends and get to know each other (Hinduja & Patchin, 2008; Valkenburg, Schouten, & Peter, 2005).”
Feeling Bad on Facebook: Depression disclosures by college students on a Social Networking Site (2011, background): “[22–24] One popular feature of Facebook is the ‘‘status update,’’ in which personally written text describing the profile owner’s current experience or emotion are displayed along with the date and time of disclosure.”
Children and Adolescents and Digital Media (2016, background): “108 – 112 A growing body of evidence suggests that peer viewers of this content are influenced to see these behaviors as normative and desirable.”
Rates of cyber victimization and bullying among male Australian primary and high school students (2012, neutral): “Bullying is a complex multidimensional phenomenon (Kyriakides, Kaloyirou & Lindsay, 2006), the adverse consequences of which are well documented (Rigby & Griffiths, 2011), including for example introverted personality, poor self-concept, helplessness, emotional problems and particularly, depression,”
The 'Privacy Paradox' in the Social Web: The Impact of Privacy Concerns, Individual Characteristics, and the Perceived Social Relevance on Different Forms of Self-Disclosure1 (2014, background): “Furthermore, it is often argued that young users in particular disclose more incautiously because they are used to the process of revealing personal information (Hinduja & Patchin, 2008; Lenhart et al., 2007; Peter & Valkenburg, 2011; Rideout et al., 2010).”
The Internet and Adolescent Girls’ Weight Satisfaction and Drive for Thinness (2010, background): “While Myspace and Facebook both have age limits (over 13 and 14 years respectively), younger adolescents and children can, and a number do (Hinduja and Patchin 2008), easily circumvent these limits by posting an older age, and so may be exposed to age-inappropriate material.”