Friends posting photos of smoking and drinking alcohol on social networking websites can provoke teens to indulge in such behavior themselves, a latest study warns.
"Our study shows that adolescents can be influenced by their friends' online pictures to smoke or drink alcohol," said Thomas W Valente, the study's principal investigator from the University of Southern California (USC).
"To our knowledge, this is the first study to apply social network analysis methods to examine how teenagers' activities on online social networking sites influence their smoking and alcohol use," said Valente.
For the study, the researchers studied 1,563 10th-grade students, aged averagely 15, from the El Monte Union High School District in Los Angeles County from October 2010 to April 2011. The participants were asked about their online and offline friends networks and the amount of time spent on the use of social media, smoking and alcohol consumption.
The results showed that the number of 'friends' on the websites did not significantly impact risky behaviour. But they found that the friends who uploaded their smoking and drinking alcohol photos on Facebook, MySpace or other networking websites majorly provoked teens to start smoking and drinking.
"The evidence suggests that friends' online behaviours are a viable source of peer influence," said Grace C Huang, lead author of the study.
"This is important to know, given that 95 per cent of 12 to 17 year olds in the US access the Internet every day, and 80 per cent of those youth use online social networking sites to communicate," said Huang.
The research found that around 30 percent of the students smoked and more than half of those studied consumed alcohol in April 2011. Around one-third of students reported having at least one friend who smoked or consumed alcohol. Nearly half of all students used Facebook and MySpace regularly.
