Text messaging has become nearly ubiquitous within youth culture. Experts estimate that teenagers send and receive an average of 60 to 100 messages each and every day. The communication is so common that emoticons and text abbreviations have worked their way into pop culture and even online dictionaries. A new study finds that most text messaging is fairly positive in nature, but that when teens text about anti-social behaviors it could be a precursor to actually engaging in anti-social behavior.
The study, which appeared in a recent edition of the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, was conducted through the University of Texas, Dallas. Researchers there handed out free Blackberry devices to 172 high school freshmen at nearly 50 schools. Along with their Blackberry, students were provided with a free service plan on the condition that their texts would be open to researcher viewing. For one year researchers quietly observed text messages flying back and forth to and from the freshmen and their friends and parents. Close to 6 million text messages were archived in a secure database over the course of the study.
Next, the text messages were flagged for talk or mention of designated anti-social behaviors like buying or using illicit drugs, criminal activity such as vandalism or other property crimes, physical aggressiveness and other challenges to established rules. The scientists then sifted through a four-day compilation of texting for each of the 172 study participants.
Students in the study were also asked to self-report on their behavior prior to and following their freshman year. Parents and teachers also rated the student’s behavior before and after the freshman year. This allowed researchers to set instances of anti-social texting alongside any instances of anti-social behavior in order to gauge how texting about certain activities may have impacted the likelihood of participating in those same kinds of actions.
Researchers found that the rate of anti-social texting was actually pretty low — just two percent — with no real difference in the number sent between girls and boys. When teens did talk about rule breaking behaviors with one another via text, it seemed more acceptable to the teens. And when they felt free to talk without adult interference, in some instances in the very presence of an adult, rule breaking information was shared, discussed and planned. For some, having these discussions at school or around authority figures made the discussion even more appealing.
This, say researchers, could be a sign that the teen is already headed down the wrong path. Talking about deviant behaviors with other rule-breaking peers made it much more likely that the teen would act out in ways such as substance abuse, physical violence or theft. This is precisely what researchers had hoped to discover — how talking about deviant behaviors might predict bad behaviors.
There have been previous studies on this topic, but they were based on teen self-reporting of text content. This meant that teens were responsible for mentioning texting about things like substance abuse, criminal behavior and violence, something the new study’s team says would not be very likely. The new study hoped to get a more realistic picture of teen texting and behavior by reading actual texts and then comparing them to behavior reported not only by the student but from adults in direct contact with the teen during and after the study time period.
The results show that very few teens spend time texting about rule-breaking and anti-social behaviors, but that when they do there is a strong link to taking part in deviant activity. The lead researcher in the study hastened to note that the bulk of text messaging was quite positive and often encouraged fellow students in meaningful ways. Digital communication, like all other forms of communication, can be used positively or negatively.
