Advances in Information Science
The Effect of Social Network Sites on Adolescents’
Social and Academic Development: Current Theories
and Controversies
June Ahn
University of Maryland, College Park, College of Information Studies & College of Education, 2117J Hornbake
Building, South Wing, College Park, MD 20742. E-mail: ahnjune@gmail.com
Teenagers are among the most prolific users of social
network sites (SNS). Emerging studies find that youth
spend a considerable portion of their daily life interact-
ing through social media. Subsequently, questions and
controversies emerge about the effects SNS have on
adolescent development. This review outlines the theo-
retical frameworks researchers have used to understand
adolescents and SNS. It brings together work from dis-
parate fields that examine the relationship between SNS
and social capital, privacy, youth safety, psychological
well-being, and educational achievement.These research
strands speak to high-profile concerns and controver-
sies that surround youth participation in these online
communities, and offer ripe areas for future research.
The current tools of teenage communication go by a pecu-
liar set of names.Wall Posts, Status Updates, Activity Feeds,
Thumbs Ups, and Profiles are some of the ways that youth
today communicate with one another. These tools are fea-
tures of social network sites (SNS), such as Facebook and
MySpace. SNS are part of a suite of Web applications, also
called social media, which utilize Web 2.0 principles. The
termWeb 2.0 defineswebsites that are designed to: (a) rely on
the participation of mass groups of users rather than centrally
controlled content providers, (b) aggregate and remix con-
tent from multiple sources, and (c) more intensely network
users and content together (O’Reilly, 2007). Adolescents use
socialmedia in large numbers. For example, a national survey
in 2009 finds that 73% of online teenagers use SNS, which
is an increase from 55% 3 years earlier (Lenhart, Purcell,
Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010).
That youth are connected to these global online com-
munities is both a frightening prospect for parents and
Received November 13, 2010; revised February 25, 2011; accepted March
2, 2011
© 2011 ASIS&T • Published online 26 April 2011 in Wiley Online Library
(wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/asi.21540
educators and an intriguing area for social science research.
For example, educators and parents in the United States
face difficult quandaries concerning students and SNS.Many
scholars suggest that students learn in new ways using social
media and that educators should embrace these newplatforms
(Ito et al., 2009; Jenkins, 2006). Nevertheless, most school
districts block access to SNS (Lemke, Coughlin, Garcia,
Reifsneider, & Baas, 2009), while parents remain fearful
about safety and effects on their children’s social develop-
ment. Teenage youth are a unique population of SNS users.
They are among the first to have grown up entirely sur-
rounded by communication technologies. Teenagers are also
in a period of rapid development, growth, and maturation.
Research about social media effects on youth promises to
contribute significantly to the concerns of adults whomediate
access to these online communities.
In this article I consider several key controversies around
youth participation in SNS and review relevant research that
begin to inform these debates. I first consider the theoretical
considerations that arise when one focuses on SNS effects on
youth. To search for effects engenders particular orientations
toward causal theories and methodologies. However, prior
research on media effects consistently shows that technol-
ogy alone cannot be hypothesized to affect human outcomes.
Instead, a social informatics approach that examines the inter-
action between technical features of SNS communities and
how teenagers adopt SNS is needed (Kling, 2007). Working
from a concrete epistemological framework, I then define
SNS and describe studies that capture how youth use these
technologies to develop relationships, interact with friends,
and learn new skills. Finally, the article reviews relevant
research that informs several controversies concerning SNS
and adolescents. The specific controversies reviewed are:
• Are there digital divides concerning youth participation in
SNS?
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, 62(8):1435–1445, 2011

• Does adolescent participation in SNS expose them to harm or
help them develop relationships?
• Do youth activities in SNS influence their personal develop-
ment in terms of self-esteem and psychological well-being?
• Does SNS use affect student learning or academic achieve-
ment?
Several considerations also frame this review. I use the
terms youth, teenagers, and adolescents interchangeably
throughout the text. As Large (2005) notes, it is diffi-
cult to define categories such as children, adolescents, and
young adults in concrete terms. National studies often define
teenagers as between the ages of 12–17 (see Lenhart et al.,
2010). However, Ito et al. (2009) observe that terms such
as children, adolescents, and young adults are socially and
culturally constructed labels. In their case studies of youth
and media they define children as less than 13 years of
age, teenagers and adolescents as between 13–18, and young
adults as 19–30 years old. Given these elastic conceptual-
izations of youth as a developmental category, this article
casts a wider net to include studies that consider adolescents
between the ages of 12–18.
This review also includes pertinent studies that deal with
adult and young adult populations. The research literature
pertaining to youth (12–18) and SNS is only just emerging,
with few studies that explicitly consider the unique contexts
of teenagers. Many studies consider college-age or young
adult users of SNS. While such research does not consider
adolescents as defined earlier, they provide rich theoretical
frameworks and considerations from which to build stud-
ies of youth populations. For example, early studies find that
college student use of Facebook is related to positive relation-
ships to their peers on campus (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe,
2007). The intriguing question for youth researchers then is
to consider whether such findings also apply to younger age
groups and in what areas one might find differences. The
societal impact of youth media research is significant. Stud-
ies that directly inform the debates and controversies outlined
in this article have tremendous promise to both improve youth
access and utilization of socialmedia, and also contribute sig-
nificant theoretical insight into the media effects of SNS on
adolescent populations.
Media Effects as a Product of Social Informatics
Systems
Many of the controversial questions concerning SNS ask
what kinds of effects these technologies have on youth devel-
opment. Given this focus, the media effects paradigm is a
natural area to begin conceptualizing theories of SNS effects.
Media effects scholars examine the outcomes that arise when
people use new technologies. Talking about effects engenders
important theoretical discussions thatmust be laid clear when
examining studies. Most significantly, the term implies a
focus on causality. Studies in this framework imply that
a media form, or the features of the technology, causally
influences some outcome (Eveland, 2003). The structure of
questions from this perspective is usually in the form of:
Do media affect learning? Do video games make children
violent? Or do SNS affect the psychological well-being of
adolescents?Media effects scholars in a variety of fields have
quickly come to realize that the answers to these questions
are more complex.Very rarely, if ever, is there a direct causal
relationship between a technology and a social outcome such
as learning (i.e., Clark, 1983, 1991; Schmidt & Vandewater,
2008).
Early media studies often used a technological frame-
work or object-centered approach (Fulk & DeSanctis, 1999;
Nass & Mason, 1990). Such a perspective assumes and tests
whether a technology itself causally affects a social out-
come. For example, a common question in youth research is
whether media affects learning. Education researchers now
firmly conclude that a media tool itself does not affect stu-
dent learning (Clark, 1983, 1991). Numerous studies show
that the media tool neither improves nor negatively impacts
learning when compared to the same teaching strategy in the
classroom (Bernard et al., 2004; Clark, 1983, 1991). What
matters is not the computer, but the learning behaviors that
occur within the software or educational program.
Counter to the technological determinism seen in pre-
vious media effects research, theoretical orientations that
combine technology affordances with social adoption come
with various names such as an emergent perspective (Fulk &
DeSanctis, 1999) or social informatics (Kling, 2007). Tech-
nology is a structuring factor. Features of a technology, not
the technology itself, enable and constrain how one uses that
tool. Simultaneously, social forces such as cultural norms
and behavioral practices influence how one ultimately uses a
technology. This social informatics perspective offers several
grounding principles for researchers of SNS. The SNS plat-
form itself does not cause outcomes such as psychological
well-being, social capital, or learning. Rather, the commu-
nication and cultural behaviors of users—how they share
information, social support, or information—can be theo-
rized as the causal mechanism. Undoubtedly, social media
platforms such as SNS alter how communication happens.
However, one cannot find effects of the technology alone
without taking into account the communication behaviors
within the system. To understand SNS as a social informat-
ics system (Kling, 2007), researchers must take into account
(a) the features of SNS, (b) the user populations in these
online communities, and (c) the behaviors that can plausibly
be linked to social outcomes.
What are Social Network Sites and How
Do Youth Use Them?
When a teenager joins a site like Facebook they first create
a personal profile. These profiles display information such as
one’s name, relationship status, occupation, photos, videos,
religion, ethnicity, and personal interests.What differentiates
SNS frompreviousmedia like a personal homepage is the dis-
play of one’s friends (boyd & Ellison, 2007). In addition to
exhibiting a network of friends, other users can then click
on their profiles and traverse ever widening social networks.
1436 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY—August 2011
DOI: 10.1002/asi