Children, Adolescents, and the Internet: A New Field of Inquiry in Developmental Psychology Patricia Greenfield University of California, Los Angeles Zheng Yan University at Albany, State University of New York With this special section on children, adolescents, and the In- ternet, we survey the state of a new field of enquiry in develop- mental psychology. This field is important because developmen- talists need to understand how children and adolescents live in a new, massive, and complex virtual universe, even as they carry on their lives in the real world. We have selected six empirical articles to showcase various aspects of child and adolescent development in this virtual universe. These articles reflect three major themes of this new field: 1. Communication on the Internet. Two articles analyze how adolescents interact to co-construct their own com- munication environments. These environments can be, on the one hand, mostly “normal” (Subrahmanyam, Sma- hel, & Greenfield’s analysis of behavior in teen chat rooms) and, on the other hand, mostly pathological (Whitlock, Powers, & Eckenrode’s analysis of self-injury bulletin boards). 2. Cognitive development, academic achievement, and the Internet. Jackson et al. focus on academic achievement; Yan, in contrast, treats the Internet itself as an object to be cognized. 3. Adolescents in a globalized Internet world. Cassell, Huf- faker, Ferriman, & Twersky examine interaction in an online community consisting of over 3,000 adolescents representing 139 countries. In contrast, Borzekowski, Fabil, & Asante document the growing importance of health information on the Internet for adolescents in Accra, Ghana, and, by implication, the Internet’s poten- tial as a health information source for adolescents throughout the Third World. These three sections reflect one of our major editorial goals: to sample various relevant aspects of development as they relate to the Internet. Encompassing the broad areas of cognitive and social development, these articles address a number of different specific developmental functions. Yan analyzes the factors influencing the development of an understanding of the Internet in both its tech- nical and social dimensions. Jackson et al. demonstrate the positive impact of home Internet access on the reading achievement of low-income, mostly African American children. In the arena of social development, articles deal with five important foci of ado- lescent development: identity (Subrahmanyam et al.); self-worth (Whitlock et al.); sexuality (Subrahmanyam et al.; Borzekowski et al.); health behaviors (Borzekowski et al.; Whitlock et al.); and leadership (Cassell et al.). The selection of articles reflects a second editorial goal: to sample both the positive and negative aspects of the virtual world in which children and adolescents are increasingly living. For example, from Whitlock and colleagues, we learn about the neg- atives of Internet bulletin boards that spread practices of adoles- cent self-injury in the United States; but this mostly negative picture is balanced by Borzekowski and colleagues who present a very positive image of adolescents using the Internet for health information in the Third World, where traditional sources of such information are less available. Another of our editorial goals was to sample as large an age range as possible. The six articles in this section cover the range from elementary schoolchildren through adolescents; however, four of the six articles focus exclusively on adolescents. This is not exactly a sampling problem. We believe that this emphasis in the field reflects an actual developmental fact: Adolescents use the Internet much more than children do (e.g., Thornburgh & Lin, 2002). However, the age of first Internet use is rapidly descending (e.g., Wartella, Vandewater, & Rideout, 2005), and developmental researchers are beginning to follow the age trend downward. Meanwhile, developmental psychologists face the significant chal- lenge of how to study Internet use among young and older adults from a life span developmental perspective, complementing the industrial psychology and cognitive psychology perspectives that are currently popular. We also utilized a very broad definition of development. The six articles include traditional operationalizations of development, such as cross-sectional age comparisons (Yan), short-term longi- tudinal study (Jackson et al.), and development as a life cycle stage (Whitlock; Subrahmanyam et al.; Cassell et al.; Borzekowski et al.). The Internet environment also brought new challenges in operationalizing development. How should researchers handle self-described age or gender in an anonymous virtual environment like a self-injury bulletin board or a teen chat room? In their discussion section, Subrahmanyam et al. offer some perspectives on this methodological issue. This is a unique challenge that Patricia Greenfield, Department of Psychology and Children’s Digital Media Center, University of California, Los Angeles; Zheng Yan, Depart- ment of Educational and Counseling Psychology, School of Education, University at Albany, State University of New York. Preparation of this special section was supported by Children’s Digital Media Center, University of California, Los Angeles (www.cdmc .ucla.edu), under Grant from the National Science Foundation. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Patricia Greenfield, Children’s Digital Media Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1285 Franz Hall, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90095. E-mail: greenfield@psych.ucla.edu Developmental Psychology Copyright 2006 by the American Psychological Association 2006, Vol. 42, No. 3, 391–394 0012-1649/06/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0012-1649.42.3.391 391