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• Experience sampling method (ESM)


  Also known as 'beeper studies'
• Productive


  Paid work
• Many teenagers work during high-school years
• Numbers of hours Canadian teenagers spent on paid work (StatsCan)
• Hours spent on paid work fairly steady from 1980s-2000s
• % working for pay peaked during summer months
• % working for pay took nosedive after great recession (2011) and after Covid
• Type of work varies by age


  • As adolescents get older, they become less likely to work in informal jobs (babysitting, lawn or yard work) and more likely to enter the formal labour force (retail, restaurants)
• Longstanding assumptions about work

  • Learn from adults other than parents, teachers or coaches
  • Lean responsibility
  • Apply skills learned in school
  • Own income helps to learn money management
  • Learn how to budget, save and spend money wisely
  • Work keeps teenagers busy and they do less dumb stuff (delinquent behaviour, drugs, risk taking)
  • Helps to ease transition into adulthood
• Most research has focused on 3 general questions: Does it facilitate development of responsibility? Does it interfere with school? Does it prevent problem behaviours
• Development of responsibility


  In general, the opposite seems to be true - cynical attitudes towards work, engaging in misconduct at work (stealing, lying about hours), fewer than 10% of working adolescents save up for future
• Generally surrounded by other teens, not responsible adults, and jobs available to teens suck
• Interfere with school (non-summer jobs)

  Not whether, but how much seems to matter - working long hours (~20 +hrs/week) leads to missing more school, higher dropout, less likely to participate in extracurriculars, less enjoyment out of school, spend less time on homework, earn somewhat lower grades, higher rates of cheating, taking easier courses, less ambitions for future education, complete fewer years of college/uni
• Reciprocal effects - poor school--> work more, --> poorer in school
• Paid work doesn't seem to be beneficial in general, but shorter hours in a job that teaches actual skills or summer jobs could be fine, and why they are working also matters (helping family or saving for future)
• Structured leisure time


  • Extra-curriculars (most common is sports, more prevalent in middle and higher SES populations)
  • Generally positive, but can also increase alcohol use and delinquency in the case of sports
• Unstructured leisure time


  • Hanging out with peers unsupervised
  • Media use (TV/movies, video games, being online)
  • Hobbies
  • Nothing
• Hanging out with peers unsupervised is when teens get into trouble - heightened peer pressure and conformity, brain regions still maturing, teens who like to party and "do crimes" tend to seek each other out
• Time spent in front of screens is high and increased substantially during Covid-19
• Moral panic


  Widespread feelings of fear, often irrational, that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society
• New (and old) media are often treated as the roots of society's ills, ironically this is inflamed by media
• Instead of worrying about "screen time" or "internet use" as an inherently good or bad thing, it's useful to think about what it's replacing
• 3 broad ideas about media influence

  • Cultivation theory (attitudes, values, behaviour, knowledge are molded and shaped by content exposed to)
  • Uses gratification approach (people with certain characteristics seek out certain types of media)
  • Media practice model (these effects are reciprocal)
• The media practice model is most likely closest to truth - we seek out things that appeal to us, and those things undoubtably influence how we think about the world
• Ignore sweeping generalizations about social media - we currently know very little about it, most teens use it to communicate with people they know and it often brings friends closer together, depends on how its used
• Profiles continuously ranked by # of likes received - "few likes" associated with feelings of rejection, depression, and negative self-attributions, especially pronounced in teens who had previously experienced victimization and rejection
• In Fiji, % teen girls who had purged at least once to reduce weight increased from 3% to ~50% in 1995 after first TV station was established
• Autonomy


  Self-reliant, self-sufficient, and independent from others
• Three types of autonomy


  • Emotional
  • Behavioural
  • Cognitive (value)
• Emotional autonomy


  Extent to which adolescent feels like a separate person; relinquishes their childlike dependencies
• Behavioural autonomy


  Capacity for independent decision making, not just about independence but co-regulation of decisions with parents
• Cognitive autonomy


  Developing one's own values, beliefs and opinions
• Optimal adjustment is associated with gradual increasing autonomy from middle to late adolescence and fewer discrepancies between parents and teens' perceptions of how much autonomy teen should have
• Social influences on behavioural autonomy

  • Peers
  • Siblings
  • Parent driven
  • Teen driven
• Cognitive autonomy - moral reasoning development

  Assessing moral reasoning through hypothetical moral dilemmas where a difficult choice needs to be made, interested in how people think/reason about and resolve these complex dilemmas
• Kohlberg's 3 levels of moral judgements development

  • Preconventional reasoning (most of childhood, right/wrong based on personal preferences, rewards and punishments)
  • Conventional reasoning (beginning in early adolescence, right/wrong based on role obligations, social expectations, respect for rules, laws and authority)
  • Post-conventional reasoning (late adolescence if ever, right/wrong based on abstract, universal principles of justice and rights)
• Kohlberg's theory has some big problems - biased in favour of certain groups, low ecological validity, poor predictor of how people behave in real life
• By 3 or 4 years of age, children differentiate between moral, social-conventional, and personal domains
• Stages of Kohlberg's theory of moral development

  • Invariant and universal
  • Cannot skip stages or go back to earlier stages
  • Everyone progresses through the same order
  • Variability in rate of development and how far people get
• Post-conventional reasoners


  Personal relationships and feelings are irrelevant, you are just as obligated to help a stranger you've never met as you are to your spouse or child