Adolescents' offline meetings with online contacts: Longitudinal relationships between the behavior and perceptions of risks, benefits, and peer involvement.

Abstract

Adolescents commonly meet new people online, and some later meet them in person. Such face-to-face meetings offer benefits alongside risks, which are emphasized in public discourse. Thus, adolescents' perceptions of how risky, beneficial, and normative the meetings are key to understanding their decisions to meet. Yet research on their effects is scarce and mostly cross-sectional. Drawing on the health belief model and the theory of planned behavior, this longitudinal study examines how perceived risk severity and likelihood, benefits likelihood, and peer involvement influence adolescents' face-to-face meetings with online contacts. We collected three waves of survey data from 2500 Czech adolescents (ages 11-16, 50.0% girls) and analyzed them using random intercept cross-lagged panel models. Perceived risk severity predicted a decrease in the number of face-to-face meetings, while perceived benefits likelihood predicted an increase. Reciprocally, attending more meetings predicted higher benefits likelihood and lower perceived risk severity. These reciprocal effects suggest that adolescents consider the risks and benefits of face-to-face meetings and update their perceptions based on experience. Unexpectedly, an increase in perceived risk likelihood predicted more face-to-face meetings, and perceived peer involvement did not predict either risk-benefit perceptions or the behavior itself. We discuss the nuanced influence of perceptions on different forms of adolescents' online risk-taking and implications for preventive efforts.