Your Donor Impact

Your donations help us deliver the best health information to teens.

November 2023

With a multitude of social media platforms dominating the lives of teenagers, there is ongoing concern about the quality of the information they consume and where they go to find important answers – like health information relevant to their lives.

To keep up with adolescent lives and their current habits, the continuing Healthy Teens Initiative project conducted deep research this year, and brought about some key recommendations. With the aid of AAP pediatrician experts, the American Academy of Pediatrics conducted focus groups with 13- to 18-year-old adolescents to learn more about how they access and consume health information online.

The second phase of this Friends of Children project was a content analysis and a digital ethnography. The goal was to better understand the types of resources that adolescents currently use for health information. The purpose of the ethnographies was to capture qualitative observations, including overall feel of these resources, platform navigation, and design. For each source, ethnographies were conducted by one staff researcher and one high school intern.

This research elevated teen voices and experiences and and delivered specific findings, ranging from how frequently teens experience passive exposure to mental health information, to discovering their motivations for seeking health information online, as well as their own concerns about inaccurate and harmful information. Most importantly, the project generated strong recommendations for developing a targeted, teen-focused, digital platform.

Your donations to the Friends of Children Fund are powering the great work of the Healthy Teens Initiative and helping the initiative make a significant difference this year.

Your generosity is key to moving great projects like these forward and to determining the next well-informed steps for child and adolescent health. Thank you for making that possible. It has been my pleasure to share these incredible stories with you. It fills me with pride to see what we can do together.

Warmly,

Sandy L. Chung, MD, FAAP, FACHE

President