Maintenance Notice

Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, the JMIR Publications website will be unavailable from Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Who will be affected?

Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting

Date Submitted: Jan 29, 2020
Date Accepted: Mar 29, 2020

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

Association of Social Media Use and High-Risk Behaviors in Adolescents: Cross-Sectional Study

Vente T, Daley M, Killmeyer E, Grubb LK

Association of Social Media Use and High-Risk Behaviors in Adolescents: Cross-Sectional Study

JMIR Pediatr Parent 2020;3(1):e18043

DOI: 10.2196/18043

PMID: 32452820

PMCID: 7284392

Evaluating the Impact of Social Media Use on High-Risk Behaviors in Adolescents

  • Teresa Vente; 
  • Mary Daley; 
  • Elizabeth Killmeyer; 
  • Laura K. Grubb

ABSTRACT

Background:

Previous studies have demonstrated the prevalence of social media use and identified the presence of high-risk behaviors among adolescents, including self-harm and sharing of sexually explicit messages.

Objective:

This study seeks to identify patterns in the amount of time spent on social media by adolescents who engage in high-risk behavior, and the extent to which they use social media as a platform for sharing such behaviors.

Methods:

Descriptive cross-sectional study of 176 adolescents seen in pediatric clinic at an urban medical center. We used an anonymous self-report survey to obtain demographic characteristics, rates of self-harm thoughts and behaviors, sharing of sexually explicit messages, and social media use as determined by total hours spent on social media per day and the number of applications used.

Results:

Most adolescents reported spending 3 to 5 hours on social media each day and utilizing three or more social media applications. Rates of self-injury and age of onset for self-injurious thoughts and behaviors were consistent with previous studies. Over a quarter of adolescents reported sharing sexually explicit messages. Relative risk of engaging in self-injury and or sharing sexually explicit messages increased with the use of four or more social media applications (1.66 [CI 1.11-2.48]).

Conclusions:

Results show a relationship between increased rates of high-risk behaviors and number of social media applications used. We identified relevant risk factors that clinicians can use to screen for high-risk behavior, and parents can monitor to encourage education about healthy online practices.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Vente T, Daley M, Killmeyer E, Grubb LK

Association of Social Media Use and High-Risk Behaviors in Adolescents: Cross-Sectional Study

JMIR Pediatr Parent 2020;3(1):e18043

DOI: 10.2196/18043

PMID: 32452820

PMCID: 7284392

The author of this paper has made a PDF available, but requires the user to login, or create an account.

© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.