Fields of Impact of Social Media on Youth – Methodological Implications

Using social media Web sites is among the most common activities of today’s children and adolescents. Such sites offer today’s youth a portal for entertainment and communication, and have grown exponentially in recent years. Parents and teachers become aware of the nature of social media sites, thus they do not know that not all of them are healthy environments for children and adolescents. This field is important because pedagogists, psychologists and pediatrics need to understand how youth lives in a new, massive, and complex virtual universe, even as they carry on their lives in the real world. In the article I have presented a discussion of a few empirical research carried out by different authors to show various aspects of child and adolescent development in this virtual universe and to present the methodological implications of such types of studies.