Social media use has become so pervasive in the lives of American teens that having a presence on a social network site is almost synonymous with being online. Fully 95% of all teens ages 12-17 are now online and 80% of those online teens are users of social media sites. The authors focused their attention in this research on social network sites…

Interviews with young teens offered many complex and often idiosyncratic reasons why they did or did not participate in structured activities (for example: personality, interest, attitudes about time use, personal and family life circumstances). However, there also exist common threads that should give one pause regarding the current wisdom on how…