As is well known, the teenager years are a special and important period of growth for children, or young adults, to be more precise.  It is growing pain, mixed with joy.  It is often a rebellious phase when both parents and teens find it difficult to communicate with each other.  Things can go seriously wrong at home or in school.

It is for this reason that motivated the founding of the BayEcho organization.  The primary goal of BayEcho is to establsh a patform where parent-teen communication can be facilitated and education and life experiences are shared.  In BayEcho, the Teens Speak Out team makes presentations on teen-related topics in local communities to have the teens' voice heard and to raise the awareness of the teens' issues and the importance of parent-teens communication.

But how much do we know about teens?  What are the concerns in the public opinions?  In order to provide insights into teens' topics, BayEcho Teens' Speak Out send out surveys each year to teens and parents on a list of related topics on dating, school stress, and communication problems, etc.  They then sit down to study the responses and formulate the presentation slides.  This year, Tanya has decided to take some suveys one step further to benefit from social media big data and from the priviledge she has with her linguist Dad who has developed this "wonderful toy" that can mine most any topics from social media.  Compared with hundreds of manual surveys they collect each year, big data insights are typically supported by thousands of, or even millions of, data points.  Therefore it may reveal some global view of the topic and renders some insightful findings of public opinion and sentiments.

So she started with the topic "Teen" and wants to see what are the public sentiments and opinions on teens.  Here are the preliminary results.

There are 7.8 million data points for this automated survey.  As seen, teen is a topic that is addressed fairly evenly through the year.  The most related theme terms with teen are presented below in the Theme Cloud, with Teen Mom, parents, School and Kids as most relevant co-occuring topics.

The emotions:

Going beyond emotions, when we put the top mentions of specific positive comments and nagative issues together, we see the general public is much more concerned with teens' problems, represented by phrases in big red fonts.  The top concern is the wide spread depression (mood swing, irritability) among teens, which sometimes leads to violence, pregnance, and even suicide.

Let us see the pie-chart of the top 15 issues with American teens and their distribtion in three categories: (1) depression 72% (17.8+15.2+14.6+13.4+11.2=72.2); (2) killing & suicide 12% (7.5+2.5+1.5=11.5); (3) sex & pregnancy 11% (3.9+3.9+1.7+1.6=11.1).  Pretty scary.  

On the more positive side, we see teens are engaged in texting a lot, pay great attention to how they look, and play with video or games a lot.

The automated survey on teens is done on the following social media sources, mostly twitter and Facebook.

Finally we give the top authors who discuss and are involved in the teen topic the most in social media:

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