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Abstract

Social media have dramatically altered the communication landscape, offering novel contexts for individual expression. But how do youth who are civically engaged off-line manage opportunities for civic expression on social media? Interviews with 70 U.S.-based civic youth aged 15 to 25 revealed three main patterns characterizing the relationship between off-line participation and online expression: blended, bounded, and differentiated. Five sets of empirically derived considerations influencing expression patterns emerged: organizational policies, personal image and privacy, perceived alignment with civic goals, attitudes toward the platform(s), and perceptions of their audience(s). Most civic youth express the civic online, yet a minority highlight tensions that lead them to refrain from sharing in certain or all online contexts.

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An earlier investigation of civically engaged youth’s online civic expression, conducted by the authors, revealed that most youth expressed their off-line civic views in their online lives. But do youth change their online civic expression over time? If so, how and why? A follow-up study of the original participants about two years later provides a longitudinal perspective on online civic expression. Survey responses from 41 U.S.-based civic youth reveal that over 40% changed their expression patterns over the two-year period, with most quieting or silencing expression. These changes correspond to a group-level shift: Withholding civic expression on social media is most common at the time of our follow-up study. Key rationales for >> Read Moreindividual shifts, as stated by participants, are described.

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Browsing Instagram is a daily practice for many teens, yet the relationship between social browsing and psychological well-being remains controversial. Recent research finds that negative social comparisons mediate the relationship between social browsing and ill-being outcomes, such as depression. The current study systematically examined the role of negative comparisons in the relationship between Instagram browsing and affective well-being immediately post-browsing. Teens (n = 507) participated in an online survey that included an Instagram browsing experience. Participants were randomly assigned to a ‘highlight reel’ condition or to one of two browsing interventions designed to reduce affective consequences of comparison. Participants completed the Positive and Negative Affect Scales (PANAS) pre- and post-browsing and reported social comparisons in response to the featured accounts. Regression analyses controlling for baseline emotions indicate that regardless of browsing condition, teens who reported higher levels of negative social comparison had significantly worse post-browsing affect than peers who reported less negative comparison to the stimuli. No main effects of browsing condition were found. However, browsing condition moderated the relationship between social comparison and affective well-being: the interventions reduced post-browsing negative affect for those at higher levels of negative comparison. Results suggest differential responses to both social browsing and social media interventions.

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The internet has become a resource for adolescents who are distressed by social and emotional problems. Social network analysis can provide new opportunities for helping people seeking support online, but only if we understand the salient issues that are highly relevant to participants personal circumstances. In this paper, we present a stacked generalization modeling approach to analyze an online community supporting adolescents under duress. While traditional predictive supervised methods rely on robust hand-crafted feature space engineering, mixed initiative semi-supervised topic models are often better at extracting high-level themes that go beyond such feature spaces. We present a strategy that combines the strengths of both these types of models inspired by Prevention Science approaches which deals with the identification and amelioration of risk factors that predict to psychological, psychosocial, and psychiatric disorders within and across populations (in our case teenagers) rather than treat them post-facto. In this study, prevention scientists used a social science thematic analytic approach to code stories according to a fine-grained analysis of salient social, developmental or psychological themes they deemed relevant, and these are then analyzed by a society of models. We show that a stacked generalization of such an ensemble fares better than individual binary predictive models.

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Earlier studies using psychometric tests have documented declines in creativity over the past several decades. Our study investigated whether and how this apparent trend would replicate through a qualitative investigation using an authentic nontest measure of creativity. Three-hundred and fifty-four visual artworks and 50 creative writing works produced by adolescents between 1990–1995 and 2006–2011 were assessed. Products were analyzed using a structured assessment method based on technical criteria and content elements. Criteria included in the current investigation (e.g., genre, medium, stylistic approach) are relevant both to the specific media domains and to previously established dimensions of creativity, such as originality and complexity. Results showed strong domain differences: performance in visual arts increased on a variety of indices of complexity and technical proficiency, and performance in writing decreased on indices related to originality and technical proficiency. Findings highlight the value of analysing creativity across domains. The importance of considering cultural and technological changes in characterizing and understanding apparent trends in amount and types of creativity is discussed.

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Abstract

Earlier studies using psychometric tests have documented declines in creativity over the past several decades. Our study investigated whether and how this apparent trend would replicate through a qualitative investigation using an authentic nontest measure of creativity. Three-hundred and fifty-four visual artworks and 50 creative writing works produced by adolescents between 1990–1995 and 2006–2011 were assessed. Products were analyzed using a structured assessment method based on technical criteria and content elements. Criteria included in the current investigation (e.g., genre, medium, stylistic approach) are relevant both to the specific media domains and to previously established dimensions of creativity, such as originality and complexity. Results showed strong domain differences: performance in visual arts increased on a variety of indices of complexity and technical proficiency, and performance in writing decreased on indices related to originality and technical proficiency. Findings highlight the value of analysing creativity across domains. The importance of considering cultural and technological changes in characterizing and understanding apparent trends in amount and types of creativity is discussed.

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