Study: Online teen peers more important than real-world friends

It’s no secret that adolescents identify strongly with their peer group, often more than with their own families. Now a new study shows that many teenagers identify more strongly with their online peers than with their real-world friends.

The study, led by researchers from the Helsinki Institute of Information Technology, surveyed more than 4,000 teenagers from the United Kingdom, Spain, and Japan who participate in the international online community Habbo. Their results showed that for these teenagers, their online groups were taking the place of more traditional peer groups in their neighborhoods or in activities they were involved in. Habbo is a teenage virtual world developed by the Sulake Corporation, with 15 million different visitors every month from 150 different countries. The study, entitled “How do young people identify with online and offline peer groups?”, was published in the Journal of Youth Studies. It was conducted by Dr. Vili Lehdonvirta of the Helsinki Institute of Information Technology along with Prof. Pekka Rasanen of the University of Turku. Another interesting aspect of the findings was that in relatively new information societies, such as Spain, a teenager’s online social contacts tended to be complete strangers, whereas in more “mature” information societies, such as the UK and Japan, online contacts included family and real-world friends. Peer groups have long been recognized as important for a teenager’s development of identity and values. This study concludes that games and social networking sites as crucial to these experiences.