Adolescent Emoji Use in Text-Based Messaging: Focus Group Study
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Adolescents increasingly communicate through text-based messaging platforms such as SMS and social media messaging. These are now the dominant platforms for communication between adolescents, and adolescents use them to obtain emotional support from parents and other adults. The absence of nonverbal cues can make it challenging to communicate emotions on these platforms, however, so users rely on emojis to communicate sentiment or imbue messages with emotional tone. While research has investigated the functions of emojis in adult communication, less is known about adolescent emoji use. Objective: This study sought to understand whether the pragmatic functions of adolescent emoji use resemble those of adults, and to gain insight into the semantic meanings of emojis sent by adolescents. Methods: Web-based focus groups were conducted with a convenience sample of adolescents, in which participants responded to questions about their use and interpretation of emojis and engaged in unstructured interactions with one another. Two trained coders analyzed transcripts using a constant comparative coding procedure to identify themes in the discussion. Results: A total of 6 focus groups were conducted with 31 adolescent participants (mean age 16.2, SD 1.5 years). Discussion in the groups generally fell into 4 themes: emojis as humorous or absurd, emokis as insincere or complex expressions of setiment, emojis as straightforward experssions of sentiment, and emojis as having context-dependent meanings. Across themes, participants often described important differences between their own emoji use and emoji use by adults. Conclusions: Adolescent focus group participants described patterns of emoji use that largely resembled those observed in studies of adults. Like adults, our adolescent participants described emojis' semantic meanings as being highly flexible and context-dependent. They also described both phatic and emotive functions of emoji use but described both functions in ways that differed from the patterns of emoji use described in adult samples. Adolescents described their phatic emoji use as absurd and described their emotive emoji use as most often sarcastic. These findings suggest that emoji use serves similar pragmatic functions for both adolescents and adults, but that adolescents see their emoji use as more complex than adult emoji use. This has important implications for adults who communicate with adolescents through text-based messaging and for researchers interested in adolescents' text-based communication.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it