"Any girls want to chat press 911": partner selection in monitored and unmonitored teen chat rooms.
We examined the search for partners by participants in two teen chat services having different ecologies. Over 12,000 utterances from monitored and unmonitored chat rooms were analyzed to assess online partner selection attempts and to see how such attempts may be influenced by the presence of an adult monitor. We found that the search for partners is ubiquitous in adolescents' online haunts, just as it is in their offline lives, and approximately two requests for a partner occur each minute. Although partner selection appears to be an important activity in online teen chat rooms, there are differences in frequency and format (e.g., the use of numerals, sexualized requests) as a function of participants' age and gender, and chat room ecology (monitored vs. unmonitored).
Smahel
David
D
Institute for Research on Children, Youth and Family, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. smahel@fss.muni.cz
Subrahmanyam
Kaveri
K
D000293:Adolescent; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003142:Communication; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D012737:Sex Factors; D012927:Social Control, Informal