Dear fellow Quad residents,

At Dinners With Interesting People on Tuesday, 10/3/2017, the featured guest will be Robin Stevens. To join us for dinner in McClelland South Lounge, please RSVP here.

Using mixed methods including interviews, surveys, and content analysis, Dr. Stevens’ current studies highlight the “Digital Neighborhood.” The Digital Neighborhood or digital hood is defined as the online space where social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat converge and allow youth to interact and share information, create, and reinforce norms on their mobile phones, tablets, and computers.

In an ongoing study funded by NIH/National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Dr. Stevens and her colleagues at Penn Nursing’s Health Equity & Media Lab are studying more than 56,000 social media posts from youth aged 13 to 24 years old, who allowed researchers access to their social media profiles. The research team early on recognized that the youth created their own language and codes to capture experiences on social media. Dr. Stevens quickly turned to Penn computer scientists, youth advisory board members and unique crowd sourcing analysts to help interpret the data and code the social media posts to determine the relationship between  social media and sexual risk and substance use behaviors.

I hope to see you there -- anyhow those of you not afflicted with an Econ midterm that evening...

    Mark Liberman

    Faculty Director, Ware College House

    http://ling.upenn.edu/~myl