Adolescence is popularly considered a biological inevitability largely due to the prevalence of misleading claims about the adolescent brain, such as the following which appeared recently in the New York Times:

While we used to think the brain was relatively mature by 16 or 18, in fact it is still developing into the mid-20s. What does develop early is the pleasure-seeking area, the nucleus accumbens. The regions that help with abstract thinking, decision-making and judgment are still maturing, and therefore less likely to inhibit the pleasure-seeking behavior.

In fact, it’s those who argue that adolescents are intractably limited by underdeveloped brains who are displaying deficient abstract thinking and judgment, for several reasons:

• Behavioral studies do not support the hypothesis that adolescents are biologically or cognitively deficient. Memory peaks shortly after puberty. Raw intelligence scores peak around age 14. Piaget’s formal operational thinking stage is usually attained by age 15. Lawrence Kohlberg found most teens are capable of moral reasoning at the level of adults. And behavioral studies of decision making and judgment have also found that teens perform at a level equal to adults. (Source)
• The causal relationship between brain activity and behavior is unclear. Might behavior produce brain activity? Although there is a definite pattern of brain activity associated with schizophrenia, for example, Joseph Dumit has shown that many schizophrenics actually have “normal” brains. Yet even scientists who (should) know that correlation does not imply causation frequently conclude from correlational studies that brain activity is causing behavior.
• To attach the labels of “developing” or “maturing” to changes in brain activity over time is to impose a narrative not reflected in the data. Suppose the same changes were found to occur between the ages of 40 and 55, rather than ages 10 and 25. No one would think to apply the “maturing” descriptor, because the 40 year old is already “mature.” When the data is interpreted to coincide with cultural expectations of extended adolescence, however, the descriptor is uncritically applied.

Cross-cultural data overwhelmingly demonstrate that adolescence is a social construction. Fifty-five percent of societies studied by anthropologists don’t even have a word for “adolescence.” Contemporary adolescence has its roots not in biology, but in the urbanization, immigration, labor and educational movements, and misguided psychological theories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The empirical data generated from new brain scan technologies, then, are used to reinforce hierarchical age relationships much as phrenology was used to reinforce hierarchical class relationships in the nineteenth century. No doubt brain activity is more strongly correlated with psychosocial behavior than skull shapes, but this is not a high bar to clear–glaring disparities remain and at present the causal inferences are just as dubious.

Until these problems are resolved, telling youths they lack the cranial capacity to regulate their behavior is no more scientifically valid than slandering someone for having the brainpan of a stagecoach tilter.

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Earlier this month I spent a week at the National Data Archive for Child Abuse and Neglect investigating the correlation between guardian behaviors (rules, filters, surveillance, etc.) and youth online safety.

I’ve recently become interested in how technology use among youths is regulated within the family. Parents tend to learn about parenting mostly from their own parents, but that resource is of limited use with new technologies, so it raises the questions of how and from whom guardians are learning about how to deal with youths and digital media.

I quickly discovered that there are many studies of youths’ online experiences, but very few studies of how guardians regulate their youths’ use of digital media–much less correlating those guardian behaviors with online safety. So I took the opportunity to use the NDACAN’s data to look more closely at this relationship.

“Online safety,” in this context, refers to two classes of events: (1) exposure to illicit or threatening content against the youth’s will, such as being cyberbullied, exposed to pornography, or sexually solicited, and (2) unsafe behaviors initiated by the youth, such as revealing too much personal information or participating in cyberbullying or sexual activity.

Two big caveats: (1) The data is ten years old—equivalent to the paleolithic era in Internet time. (2) There’s no time-order data, so there’s no way to tell which came first, the guardian strategy or the unsafe event. I’ll address these limitations in a new study I’m planning for the fall, which will update the instrument and should allow an interesting comparative analysis of how guardian and youth behaviors have changed over the past decade.

Despite these limitations, the results were interesting, and since so many public discussions of Internet safety rely on anecdotes, media sensationalism, and biased “studies” conducted by advocacy groups, I thought I’d share my main findings:

(1) The effect of guardian strategies is small but significant. Guardian strategies collectively accounted for about as much variance as demographic controls such as age and sex, but had just one-fourth the explained variance of variables assessing access in the home, frequency of use (days per week), intensity of use (hours per day), and diversity of use (do they use e-mail, do they use IM, etc.).

(2) A good relationship is important. When the guardian and youth both agreed that they got along “very well,” the youth was less likely to have had an unsafe incident.

(3) Learning about the Internet is important. Youths with guardians who knew as much or more about the Internet as they did were less likely to have an unsafe event than youths who knew more about the Internet than their guardian.

(4) Talking about the risks is important. Among frequent youth users, the more their guardians had talked with them about online dangers, the less likely they were to have had an unsafe event.

(5) Having rules is important. “Rules,” in this context, refers to an understanding between the guardian and youth about what (s)he can or cannot do, like time limits, curfews, or designating certain sites or types of interactions as off limits. (It does not necessarily mean that the youth’s activities are monitored or the rule is enforced.) Youths who had more of these understandings were less likely to have had an unsafe event.

(6) The jury is still out on filters and surveillance. Blocks and filters on home computers were insignificant predictors of whether or not youths experienced an unsafe event. Surveillance (which ranges from the guardian occasionally peeking over the youth’s shoulder to checking browser histories or using keyloggers), meanwhile, was positively correlated with unsafe events.

As I stressed earlier, it’s impossible to know whether guardians with youths who have been unsafe online implement surveillance by way of response, or whether guardians implement surveillance first and then the youth figures out a way around it and subsequently experiences an unsafe event. So I definitely wouldn’t say that the evidence shows that surveillance doesn’t work—but I also didn’t find any evidence that it works either.

I was surprised that the autocratic methods, such as filters and surveillance, were less effective than the more collaborative methods, such as conversations and rules. In a content analysis of newspaper coverage of sexting that I’m preparing for the ASA annual meeting in August, I found that the autocratic methods were commonly and aggressively advanced by law enforcement officials, editorialists, and even parenting experts. Guardians were systematically portrayed as admirable, autocratic tough-lovers or, conversely, negligent enablers.

Given the popularity of autocratic methods in the media—and the potential damage to the guardian-youth relationship they risk—it will be interesting to see in future studies whether they are actually more effective than talking and setting some guidelines.

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My paper, “Teens, Tribunes, and Tribulations: Representations of Youth and Technology in Mass Media,” is now available for download.

Written last fall for a public sociology class, it examines how essentialist and determinist constructions of youth and technology (of the sort espoused by Bauerlein in my most recent post) act as vehicles for exploitative adult beliefs and fears related to power, control, and norm preservation.

This paper was also a winner of the District of Columbia Sociological Society’s 2010 Irene B. Taeuber Graduate Student Paper Award.

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Mark Bauerlein is an English professor, moral panic practitioner, technological determinist, and G. Stanley Hall kool aid drinker, as evidenced by his book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.

These credentials are evidently sufficient for an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, where Bauerlein argues that digitally mediated communication makes kids social morons too stupid to understand nonverbal cues:

In Silicon Valley itself, as the Los Angeles Times reported last year, some companies have installed the “topless” meeting—in which not only laptops but iPhones and other tools are banned—to combat a new problem: “continuous partial attention.” With a device close by, attendees at workplace meetings simply cannot keep their focus on the speaker. It’s too easy to check email, stock quotes and Facebook. While a quick log-on may seem, to the user, a harmless break, others in the room receive it as a silent dismissal. It announces: “I’m not interested.” So the tools must now remain at the door.

Older employees might well accept such a ban, but younger ones might not understand it. Reading a text message in the middle of a conversation isn’t a lapse to them—it’s what you do. It has, they assume, no nonverbal meaning to anyone else.

It does, of course, but how would they know it?

I mean really, young people—do you have to create your own social meanings? Can’t you just assimilate completely into the dominant culture?

Bauerlein cites as evidence the work of anthropologist, Edward T. Hall, who “argued that body language, facial expressions and stock mannerisms function ‘in juxtaposition to words,’ imparting feelings, attitudes, reactions and judgments in a different register.” Apparently it never occurs to Bauerlein that Hall was describing a particular social context (i.e., face-to-face communication) and other cues may fill the role of nonverbals in different contexts. Or that he is perpetuating a tired trope that has accompanied youth and technology for nearly one hundred years–despite the fact that radio, television, video games, and other media have yet to destroy society.

Bauerlein ends with an ethnocentric plea for compassion :

Lots of folks grumble about the diffidence, self-absorption and general uncommunicativeness of Generation Y. The next time they face a twenty-something who doesn’t look them in the eye, who slouches and sighs for no apparent reason, who seems distracted and unaware of the rising frustration of the other people in the room, and who turns aside to answer a text message with glee and facility, they shouldn’t think, “What a rude kid.” Instead, they should show a little compassion and, perhaps, seize on a teachable moment. “Ah,” they might think instead, “another texter who doesn’t realize that he is communicating, right now, with every glance and movement—and that we’re reading him all too well.”

Seems to me a more compassionate interpretation would be ‘People construct their own meanings, groups negotiate meanings that are contested and constantly changing, and the dominant meanings will be different in twenty years whether I like it or not. Though it may come at a cost to certain literacies and meanings I value, these youths are engaging their social world and developing new literacies and meanings. Good for them.’

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FiveThirtyEight, a paragon of insightful statistical commentary, critiques a series of Hyundai commercials featuring Jeff Bridges in which adult fears of reckless teen drivers are exploited to sell cars:

My point here is not to justify teen driving behavior. It’s a serious problem, but one that receives ample attention, publicity and action by state legislatures. But few dare mention the fatality accidents on the other end of the age spectrum because seniors are politically powerful in ways teenagers are not. Worse, Hyundai apparently thinks it’s clever or cool to sell cars by making people fear young drivers. They would never do this if political clout were similar for younger drivers and older drivers, who happen to be–albeit for different reasons, of course–our most dangerous drivers.

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I was strolling through the old Google Reader this morning and found an article on CNN about “hooking up.” How’s this for a first sentence?

When Jennifer Nicholas sees television shows or movies where characters “hook up” or have sex with “friends with benefits,” she cringes, because that’s how she got herpes.

Subtext, anyone?

I don’t really have anything to add, except what South Park has already said.

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I like the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Their surveys are reliable and well-constructed, and they’ve collected tons of publicly available data over the past 10 years.

Their public relations, though, doesn’t approach the quality of their methods. Exhibit A: thorough takedowns of last month’s “just-this-side-of-moral-crusading…soft ball pitch to those who will turn it into media hoo-ha” report on sexting by Dan at Sociology of Information and Jay at Montclair SocioBlog. In my experience this isn’t an isolated incident–Pew seems to want to position themselves as a reliable source for academics but also to frame their reports in such a way that misleading sound bites can be grabbed by moral-panicking journalists.

Now their latest report is about the Millennial Generation, complete with a cute little quiz to find out how Millennial you are.

Observations:

• Generations are tricky academic constructs. If you really want to distinguish between cohorts (people occupying same or similar age positions at a particular point in time) and young people in general, you have to have longitudinal data. For example, Pew notes that Millennials are the most liberal age group today. Are Millennials more liberal than young people were in the 1960s or 1980s? They don’t say.
• Social actors shape society and are shaped by society in turn. Generational constructs tend to emphasize one of those relationships over the other. “Find out how today’s teens and twentysomethings are reshaping the nation,” the Pew tagline reads. How are they being shaped, besides by technology? Again, no real answer.
• Generational constructs also tend to define generations relative to one another. By far the most salient quality of Millennials, adultcentric observers argue, is their technological literacy. (My mom, who until recently was a technology coordinator at a high school, had nearly double the score of Boomers’ average on Pew’s Millennial quiz, despite tech proficiency being her only real commonality with us young’uns.) I consider myself to have above average tech proficiency even among other Millennials, but today’s 12 year olds are likely to be far more wired in 15 years than I am today. How will we define Millennials then?
• The “wired generation” angle is especially prone to an unbalanced perspective, since technological determinism is so prevalent. For Millennials, technological determinism combines with the common narrative of youths dominated by “raging hormones” to produce a doubly deterministic perspective. Kids today can’t control themselves, the story goes, and technology is the great enabler for all those dirty behaviors. If those kids would just put down their iPods, maybe this country wouldn’t be heading down the crapper.
• Society fears youths (especially lower-class or minority youths), but we also fear for them (especially when they’re white and middle- to upper-class). Because middle- to upper-class youths are the ones using the technology, their indiscretions involving technology have to be explained away without disparaging their race or class identities. So the blame is affixed to their age (i.e., raging hormones), to the technology itself (in its enabling capacity), and/or to the corrupting influence on the other side of the technologically mediated interaction (the predator, the exploiter of private information, the voyeur). The manifestations of these three things then become the most important artifacts of the contemporary youth experience, as seen through the eyes of the adults who fear for them.

Do the Pew study and others ultimately say anything useful about Millennials, then? Or do they say more about the generation(s) authoring them?

[Edit: Ezster Hargattai has a new article addressing the assumption that Millennials are universally tech savvy, showing significant differences by race, gender, education, and SES.]

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Susan Engel, psychologist and educational administrator, has her take on the cesspool of American education in yesterday’s NYT:

If we really want good schools, we need to create a critical mass of great teachers. And if we want smart, passionate people to become these great educators, we have to attract them with excellent programs and train them properly in the substance and practice of teaching.

Her argument–which, to be fair, includes some good ideas–is typical of the public discourse regarding education. Economics, pedagogy, and commitment are all that matter. If we attack those deficiencies with our American can-do spirit, by golly, our kids will actually start to learn something.

There are few public debates in which I wish sociologists had a more prominent voice than education. Yes, we all know the American system is failing. But the public discourse completely neglects several important questions that critical sociology has addressed in detail over the past thirty years.

• Why do we continue to embrace a nineteenth century assembly-line method of education that has been completely belied by research into individual learning styles?
• If part of the function of education is to create well-adjusted adults, why do we segregate youths from the adult world by curtailing civil liberties and property rights? Why do we warehouse them in separate institutions in which they are forced to spend far more time with their peers (hardly a model of competent adulthood) than adults?
• Why do we not acknowledge that the hidden curriculum of norms and values is just as consequential as the pedagogical curriculum? Why do we not acknowledge that schools are a site in which many of society’s most troubling features–racism, sexism, homophobia, class discrimination, and the disparity of cultural capital–are formed and institutionally sanctioned?

I’m all for more competent and better compensated teachers. But the public discourse has only identified part of the problem. Until the conclusions of sociologists attain wider public knowledge, education reform will be doomed to ineffective conversations about where to put the money, where to put the accountability, and who needs the most elbow grease.

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CNN takes a look at the MySpace/Facebook class divide:

A recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas found that people in more affluent demographics are 25 percent more likely to be found friending on Facebook, while the less affluent are 37 percent more likely to connect on MySpace.

More specifically, almost 23 percent of Facebook users earn more than $100,000 a year, compared to slightly more than 16 percent of MySpace users. On the other end of the spectrum, 37 percent of MySpace members earn less than $50,000 annually, compared with about 28 percent of Facebook users.

Although it was published the day after Jon Stewart hilariously destroyed CNN’s fact-checking standards, I thought it was pretty solid overall.

I wonder, though, if Facebook’s astronomical growth during this calendar year is going to reduce or even eradicate the class gap. As Facebook zooms past MySpace faster than anyone expected, even data collected six months ago is already obsolete. A plausible hypothesis would be that MySpace will see a mass exodus similar to the Friendster emigration of 2004, and all classes will gravitate toward Facebook (until the privileged classes find another site to flock to and escape the commoners…)

Cross-sectional studies are limited no matter what the context, but the pace of change in SNS behavior means cross-sectional studies of SNSs have a frighteningly small window of relevance. What if the massive growth of Facebook in the past 6 months has closed the class gap? We can’t know.

Eszter Hargattai recently repeated her 2006 study, finding that although Facebook had surpassed MySpace in popularity, the class differences remained. (Note: As of this post, Eszter’s website is down.) So her data and the Nielsen data suggest that the class gap remained as of earlier this year. But it’ll be interesting to see whether data collected now continue to replicate these findings.

I’ll be doing some cross-sectional SNS data collection in January and February of next year. And I guarantee I’ll be rushing to get it to print before it becomes obsolete.

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The Harvard Business Review recently published the above map in an article attempting to locate MySpace’s centers of activity. The colors represent relative rates of use: red states have 20% or more MySpace logins than we’d expect from their populations of Internet users, and orange states have 10-20% more. Dark blue (20+% less) and light blue (10-20% less) have fewer logins than expected, while green states are more or less consistent with expected rates (+/- 10%).

The author of the article suggests correlations with political affiliation and “media centers,” but I was interested in testing the class division hypothesis, so I pulled the three-year median household income data from the Census:

The results were significant (F = 7.18, p < .001), and the post-hoc showed that the dark blue, heavily underrepresented group was responsible: states that have far fewer MySpace logins than expected (20+%) have a significantly higher median household income than states with as many or more logins than expected (green, orange, and red states).

A bit of a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but interesting nonetheless.

The author also reported that three states had over 50% more logins than expected: Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi; these three states have the sixth-lowest, third-lowest, and lowest median household incomes by state, respectively.

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