Youth Advocacy

The purpose of our research is to examine how social networking applications encourage youth  in low-income neighborhoods and underrepresented minority groups to address health issues within the community. Through human-computer interaction (HCI) we plan to determine how social computing structures can be designed to help youth overcome feelings of disempowerment. By doing so we believe adolescents will become motivated to identify health-related problems and develop ways to address them. 

Our goal is to address challenges faced by young people by determining the strength and weaknesses of social networking applications (SNAs) for helping youth recognize local issues. We also intend to identify new guidelines for SNAs.