Online Community as Important as Family

Teenagers part of an online community identify with it almost as much as with their own families, a new international study of teenage community Habbo reveals.

Habbo is a very popular teenage virtual world, developed by Sulake Corporation, that has 15 million unique visitors from over 150 countries, every month.

The 10 year-old website is translated into 11 languages and 90 percent of its users are young people between 13 and 18 years old.

The study, authored by Dr. Vili Lehdonvirta, a researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT (currently a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo), and Professor Pekka Räsänen from the University of Turku, Finland, is based on answers from 4299 players from the UK, Spain and Japan.

The researchers pointed out that peer groups are vital for the development of the identity and values of adolescents, and that's why they wandered if online groups are replacing the traditional peer groups that tend to be fewer in some modern societies.

They found that not only online community users can replace their neighborhood or offline hobby group with the online group, but the online group can become even more important, and this applies to all three nationalities.

As online groups have a very strong psychological influence on their members, games, social networking sites and other online communities should be considered as extremely important for the way that young people identify themselves and socialize.

Also, for younger online communities such as found in Spain, for example, online groups are simply considered to be “virtual communities”, whereas in very developed information societies like Japan, they have become a way of keeping in touch with your family and friends.

This study is called “How do young people identify with online and offline peer groups? A comparison between United Kingdom, Spain and Japan” and it is published by the Journal of Youth Studies, AlphaGalileo reports.