Developmental Psychology
2006, Vol. 42, No. 3, 391–394

Copyright 2006 by the American Psychological Association
0012-1649/06/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0012-1649.42.3.391

Children, Adolescents, and the Internet: A New Field of Inquiry in
Developmental Psychology
Patricia Greenfield

Zheng Yan

University of California, Los Angeles

University at Albany, State University of New York

With this special section on children, adolescents, and the Internet, we survey the state of a new field of enquiry in developmental psychology. This field is important because developmentalists 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:

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 technical 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 adolescent 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