Social Media, Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll

Compared to teens who do not use social networks, teens who do are five times likelier to use tobacco, three times likelier to drink alcohol, and twice as likely to smoke marijuana, according to a new report getting splashed all over the Internet today.

And you always thought it just seemed people on Facebook, etc., are having more fun than you.  They really are having more fun than you.

Images of teens on social media are "rampant" with booze pix, pot pix, and all the rest.  Also tied to this, according to the report, is watching suggestive television.

There's little reason for me to repeat what you can easily see on the report itself.  Here's also a good Chicago Tribune story on the same report.

What makes me curious, and honestly I don't want to dig so deeply in the methodology today, is who the hell are these teens who don't use social media?  I strongly suspect we're not talking about a cause-and-effect relationship here, but rather the authors of the study failed to account for any number of third variables that may better explain the findings.  This often happens when people who don't normally conduct research on the media try to conduct research on the media.  They suck at it. 

If you'd like to dig deeper, here's a pdf of the report.

European Knowledge

I just finished reading -- after much Thanksgiving turkey -- this story about how much Irish high school students know, or don't know, about their country compared to similar students in 36 countries.  The story isn't as clear as I'd like, but as best I can tell, Finland teens had the highest scores, followed by, well, you can follow the link and see for yourself.

Here's what the story doesn't tell us:

• Who did the survey
• Exactly what did they ask
• When was the survey conducted
• And by what method (phone, etc.)
• Or a host of other niggling details I'd like to know.

Because, dammit, there's no link or even a mention of the source of the survey.  It covers the world, which immediately made me think of Pew's international surveys, but I don't think there's been one recently.  All in all, a poor story, but think of it as a holiday special as I engage in serious digestion.

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving.

Teens and Knowledge of Parental Spending

If you're a parent, this survey (actually, a press release about the survey) will come as no surprise -- teenagers underestimate how much parents spend on back-to-school stuff. Bill Me Later is involved in the survey, for obvious commercial reasons, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Favorite part of the press release:

...a quarter of all teens, and more than one in five preteens, indicated that there is nothing their parents won’t buy them for back to school.

Maybe so, but not in my house.

I suspect this idea could be dramatically extended into other forms of spending to explore the disconnect between what teenagers think their parents spend on them and what parents actually spend.  This is similar to studies that ask people how much the government spends on things like foreign aid (people always overestimate it).  But the teen-parent angle gives it so much more fun -- and, I suspect, the differences are always there.