Pediatrics Archives - World of Psychology

Pediatrics Gets it Wrong about Facebook Depression You know it’s not good when one of the most prestigious pediatric journals, Pediatrics, can’t differentiate between correlation and causation.

And yet this is exactly what the authors of a “clinical report” did in reporting on the impact of social media on children and teens. Especially in their discussion of “Facebook depression,” a term that the authors simply made up to describe the phenomenon observed when depressed people use social media.

Shoddy research? You bet. That’s why Pediatrics calls it a “clinical report” — because it’s at the level of a bad blog post written by people with a clear agenda. In this case, the report was written by Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe, Kathleen Clarke-Pearson and the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media (2011).

Teens Share Self-injury Videos, Researchers Fear Normalization Many newspapers and media outlets are picking up the new Pediatrics study that looked for “self injury” or “self harm” videos on YouTube and were surprised that they actually found them. I’m not sure “study” is the correct word for what the researchers did here, since millions of people each day perform similar “research” (by typing these keywords into YouTube).

From a completely descriptive study — e.g., research that is simply observing what the researchers find online — the researchers nonetheless draw the following conclusion: “The nature of nonsuicidal self-injury videos on YouTube may foster normalization of nonsuicidal self-injury and may reinforce the behavior through regular viewing of nonsuicidal self-injury — themed videos.” This isn’t a conclusion they can draw from their data, of course.

Alternative explanations abound. Could it be that a teen’s peer group has already been engaging in such behavior for years? Or that a person is unlikely to try something just because they see it on TV? After all, how many of us have gone out and killed someone after seeing hundreds (if not thousands) of murders regularly depicted on American television? Does this somehow “normalize” murder? Isn’t is equally as likely that teenagers are sharing mutual experiences, because for some minority of teens, these kinds of behaviors are completely normal already?

Pediatrics

Pediatrics Gets it Wrong about ‘Facebook Depression’

Teens Share Self-injury Videos, Researchers Fear ‘Normalization’