Young People, Social Media and Health

Victoria Goodyear, Kathleen Armour, Victoria Goodyear, Kathleen Armour

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351026963
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Health & Sexuality

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781351026987, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

The pervasiveness of social media in young people's lives is widely acknowledged, yet there is little evidence-based understanding of the impacts of social media on young people's health and wellbeing.

Young People, Social Media and Health draws on novel research to understand, explain, and illustrate young people's experiences of engagement with health-related social media; as well as the impacts they report on their health, wellbeing, and physical activity. Using empirical case studies, digital representations, and evidence from multi-sector and interdisciplinary stakeholders and academics, this volume identifies the opportunities and risk-related impacts of social media.

Offering new theoretical insights and practical guidelines for educators, practitioners, parents/guardians, and policy makers; Young People, Social Media and Health will also appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Sociology of Sport, Youth Sports Development, Secondary Physical Education, and Media Effects.

1 What young people tell us about health-related social media and why we should listen

Victoria A. Goodyear and Kathleen M. Armour

Chapter overview

The pervasiveness of social media in young people’s lives is widely acknowledged; yet, there is little robust evidence on the impacts of social media on young people’s health and wellbeing. In this chapter, we explain the innovative research we have undertaken to understand, from young people’s perspectives, the health-related issues and opportunities of social media. We explain key terms, including the new ‘content-led pedagogical framework’ and the ‘pedagogical case model’. These tools were used to present, analyse, explain, and translate empirically rich data on young people’s experiences of social media, and from stakeholder and academic groups from a range of disciplines.

The focus of the book

For many of the young people that we teach, coach, research, care for, parent, and support, it is important to remember that digital technology is regarded as an extension of self and social media is a primary mode of communication and social engagement. If, as adults, we want to reach these young people, understand something of their worlds, and offer support, we need to know how they engage with social media, what they learn from it and how that may influence their behaviours (Goodyear et al. 2018a, 2018b). While many influences may be positive, there are also likely to be periods of vulnerability in young people’s lives where the sheer scale, intensity, and pervasiveness of social media could act to intensify those vulnerabilities. Social media is certainly a very powerful and dynamic feature of contemporary youth culture and, as such, it is important to understand how it operates in key areas of young people’s lives.

This book adopts a novel approach to understanding, explaining, and communicating young people’s experiences of health-related social media, and the impacts they report on their health, wellbeing, and levels of physical activity. The chapters are underpinned by robust data. Using empirically rich composite narrative case studies and evidence from multi-sector and multi-disciplinary stakeholders and academics, the book identifies the opportunities and risk-related impacts of social media for young people’s health and wellbeing. It offers new theoretical insights, as well as evidence-based and practical guidelines for relevant stakeholders including policy makers, schools, and health and education professionals/practitioners. The evidence presented in this book also provides information that will be important for parents/guardians and will help them to better understand how to engage with and respond to young people’s contemporary needs.

The significance of this book resides in the insights it offers to address growing concerns around the world about young people’s health and wellbeing (Inchley et al. 2017; Patton et al. 2016), and reported associations between young people’s uses of social media and negative physical and mental health outcomes (Frith 2017; Swist et al. 2015; Third et al. 2017). Yet, there is limited robust evidence that explains whether and how social media influences young people’s health-related knowledge and behaviours (Przybylski and Weinstein 2017a, 2017b). As a result, many adults are uncertain about how to support young people’s engagement with health-related social media (Shaw et al. 2015; Third et al. 2017) and there is little guidance available from research and policy (Third et al. 2017; Wartella et al. 2016). This leaves adults ill-equipped both to protect young people from the negative influences of social media and to optimise the potential of social media as a medium for health promotion. This book, therefore, addresses a persistent societal question in new ways, and provides important evidence-based insights that are relevant to policy makers, researchers, health and education practitioners/professionals, and parents/ guardians who have an interest in supporting young people’s health-related understandings and behaviours.

The book is organised into three main parts, and each can be read independently or in any order. In Part I, a series of data-rich case studies illustrates some of the many ways in which young people engage with social media and how and why this can have an influence on their health-related knowledge, understandings, and behaviours. In Part II, we step back from the vivid data and draw on a range of different disciplinary perspectives to better understand the ways in which health-related social media can influence young people. In Part III, the information from the previous sections is crystallised into evidence-based actions and guidelines that can help relevant adults to mitigate against risks while simultaneously maximising the positive and powerful potential of engagement with digital health-related media.

The importance of new research on social media that listens to young people

It has been reported from numerous international and socio-economic contexts that young people have the highest rates of social media use of any age group, and that they spend significant proportions of their time ‘on’ social media (Royal Society of Public Health [RPSH] 2017; Third et al. 2017). Turkle (2017) used the concept of ‘tethered’ to describe young people’s prolific uses of social media and to highlight that young people want to be continuously ‘connected’. Others have argued that young people’s extensive and habitual uses of social media challenge the outdated notion that a dualism exists between ‘real’ life and online spaces (boyd 2014; Ito et al. 2010; Third et al. 2014). A dissolution of the online/offline binary is made apparent where social media operates as an active digital space for young people where relationships, identities, and intimacies are formed (boyd 2014; Handyside and Ringrose 2017; MacIsaac et al. 2018), and where learning can occur as a result of observing and communicating with peers of the same age (Ito et al. 2010). In this sense, social media is not merely a space where young people go to document their lives (Handyside and Ringrose 2017). Social media is a connected space for young people where communication, friendship, play, self-expression, and learning occur (Handyside and Ringrose 2017, MacIsaac et al. 2018).

There can be little doubt that understanding how social media influences young people’s knowledge and behaviour is highly complex and difficult to navigate. There are diverse modes of social media (e.g. Snapchat or Instagram) that include varied and multi-dimensional interactive functionalities (e.g. likes or followers) (Highfield and Leaver 2016). The content created and accessed on social media is also user-generated, and shared in spaces where commercial, government, community, and individual contexts overlap (Freishtat and Sandlin 2010). In turn, social media disrupts the flow of traditional forms of health knowledge, where established learning and pedagogical concepts, procedures, and frameworks are problematic to apply in this highly interactive and dynamic context (Andersson and Öhman 2017; Andersson and Olson 2014; Goodyear 2017; Goodyear et al. 2018a). Understanding how social media influences knowledge and behaviour is even more challenging given that this medium is in a constant flux of change. New platforms, functions, and features are frequently introduced and adopted in youth culture (Miller et al. 2016), such as the rapid uptake of Snapchat in recent years that has, in turn, presented new issues related to temporality and memory (Handyside and Ringrose 2017; Highfield and Leaver 2016). Social media is, therefore, a very contemporary, dynamic, and interactive medium that engages young people. Navigating this type of media and understanding how the diverse, multi-user, and multi-functional spaces influence young people’s knowledge and understanding is methodologically, theoretically, and ethically challenging.

To date, understandings of the health-related risks and opportunities of social media have been undermined by methodological weakness (Gaplin and Taylor 2017). Most studies fail to reflect the social complexity of the medium and/or the diverse ways in which young people navigate it. Evidence has been limited to one-off, short-duration intervention studies, analysis of parent/guardian and teacher perspectives, and/or evidence from survey data or observational methods (James 2014; Mascheroni, Jorge, and Farrugia 2014; Wartella et al. 2016). From these studies, health-related impacts of digital media engagement have been associated with time spent on social media, the platform, and/or the dissemination/accessibility of information (RPSH 2017; Shaw et al. 2015). Yet, the dynamic ways in which young people interact through social media (see boyd 2014), and the powerful role of, for example, peers (Ito et al. 2010), likes (Jong and Drummond 2016), followers (MacIsaac et al. 2018), and selfies (Walsh 2017) are rarely considered. To understand how social media influences knowledge and behaviours, research must therefore account for the diverse multi-user and multi-functional interactive spaces of social media, and seek to better understand how young people use, navigate, and orientate themselves to these spaces.

The pressing need for new evidence on the dynamic and interactive ways in which young people engage with health-related social media is further indicated by the clear gaps that exist between adults and young people’s understandings, where these gaps have been persistent (Buckingham 2016). International evidence suggests that young people value the accessibility of information from social media, and that they are increasingly turning to social media for health-related information (Swist et al. 2015; Third et al. 2017; Wartella et al. 2016). In existing research, young people have also reported on the benefits of social media in areas ranging from learning, socialisation, greater levels of social and emotional support, and creativity (Frith 2017; Swist et al. 2015; Third et al. 2017). Public discourse, however, tends to almost exclusively focus on social media and risk (boyd 2014). Adults also tend to assume that access to health information through social media will have negative knowledge-transmission effects that will impact on all young people in the same way (Third et al. 2017, 2014). Due to these perceived risks, there is a tendency to adopt protection-orientated approaches that seek to limit and control young people’s social media use (boyd 2014; Livingstone, Mascheroni, and Staksrud 2018). As a result, many adults are unaware of the potential for social media to act as a positive health promotion resource and they fail to appreciate the opportunities that could stem from the dynamic and interactive ways in which young people use and navigate social media.

Despite young people’s prolific engagement with social media, we, like others (Buckingham 2016; Hopkins 2010), are cautious of referring to the current generation as digital ‘natives’ or a digital youth generation. Nonetheless, we suggest that young people’s very specific levels and forms of expertise in social media use should be recognised and accommodated. It is clear that young people are avid users and drivers of this contemporary, participatory, and user-driven online culture and, to this extent, they can be understood as highly skilled and knowledgeable. Understanding the ways in which young people use social media as a space for communication, entertainment, and learning could certainly challenge the social and cultural norms and expectations of adults (Ito et al. 2010; Livingstone et al. 2018). In the context of physical activity and health, for example, it has long been argued that understanding young people’s perspectives is a powerful mechanism for designing new and more effective health and education interventions (Oliver and Kirk 2016; Leahy et al. 2016).

To understand how to better support young people’s engagement with health-related social media, we argue that there is a need to learn from the experiences of young people. Any new guidelines or proposed interventions must chime with young people’s needs and the ways in which they engage with social media. Developmentally, we know that adolescence is characterised by dynamic brain development and that interaction with the social environment shapes the capabilities an individual takes forward into adult life (Patton et al. 2016). In this context, social media can be a powerful social environment that can influence young people’s current and future health-related behaviours. We also know that during adolescence, young people’s social, emotional, and physical needs can change very rapidly, and this reinforces the need for relevant adults to be better informed about social media in order to offer appropriate support at particular points in time when young people might suddenly become vulnerable.

This book, therefore, addresses empirical, methodological, and theoretical gaps in our understandings about young people’s engagement with health-related social media, and identifies new directions for research, policy, and practice. The aims of the book are to: (i) increase awareness of the opportunities and riskrelated impacts of social media on young people’s health; (ii) generate new theoretical insights into young people’s digital health and related behaviours; and (iii) inform new guidelines and actions for health and education practitioners and other relevant adults who have a role in supporting young people to engage with health-related social media in positive ways. In this chapter, we set the context for the book by: (1) providing an overview of the underpinning research project that generated the data for the case study chapters; (2) reviewing existing research and theory in the area of social media and young people; (3) proposing a refined understanding of the concept of pedagogy to better account for the findings from our research and that of others; and (4) providing a guide to the structure and organisation of the book and each chapter.

New research: how we generated the data for the case study chapters

The underpinning research for this book was undertaken at the University of Birmingham (UK) and was supported by the Wellcome Trust.¹ Focusing on the key content areas of physical activity, diet/nutrition, and body image, we – Goodyear and Armour – sought to better understand from young people’s...