Email intervention works on teens

A study has found that teenagers are likely to clean up their social-networking profiles and increase their privacy settings if sent a cautionary email from an authority figure.

The experiment was undertaken by Dr Megan Moreno, a paediatrician and adolescent medicine specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr Meg, as she called herself in her email, contacted teens on MySpace and Facebook.

Included in the email was this message: "You seem to be quite open about sexual issues or other behaviours such as drinking or smoking. You might consider revising your page to better protect your privacy."

The study is intended to encourage parents and those who care for adolescents to take notice of what's included in teens' social-networking profiles.

Dr Moreno said parents "should feel very comfortable looking up" sites like MySpace and Facebook in a report published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

From 190 teens randomly chosen, half were sent the 'Dr Meg' email. After three months 42 per cent of those had either set their profiles to 'private', barring those only on their Friends list from accessing their profiles, or they removed references to sex or substance use.

Only 29 per cent of those in the group who had not been contacted by Dr Meg made such changes over the three-month period.

Moreno said the results suggest the email intervention had a positive impact on "the hardest-to-reach teens, which gives us great hope that a similar intervention could be used to reach teens as a whole".

http://archpedi.ama-assn.org