Blog as a way to understand adolescents
Abstract
The paper focuses on psychological aspects of blogging in the period of early and middle adolescence – it deals with the motivation of bloggers, their benefits of blogging as well as with the subjects and objects of their communication via blogs. Semi-structured interviews with 8 adolescent bloggers in the age between 13 and 17 years were conducted and analysed via grounded theory method. The results suggest that adolescents set up blogs with the intent to present themselves through their blogs in front of the peer readers. The peer readers give them social support and feedback which affects bloggers self-concept and self-esteem. Similarity in interests and opinions is also very important for adolescent relationships rising in the blogosphere. Furthermore, the particularity of pro ana blogs – a community of bloggers supporting themselves in pathological eating habits which may lead to anorexia – was mentioned. In our article, we present blogs as a possible tool which can contribute to understanding issues of the utmost importance for adolescents.
(Fulltext in Czech)
Keywords
adolescence, weblog, qualitative metodology, research on adolescentsLiterature
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