An interesting and perhaps inexpensive method of public health/behavioral research.

Perform experiments on other people's MySpace pages:

Many teenagers cleaned up their MySpace profiles, deleting mentions of sex and booze and boosting privacy settings, if they got a single cautionary e-mail from a busybody named "Dr. Meg."

The e-mail was sent by Dr. Megan Moreno, lead researcher of a study of lower-income kids that she says shows how parents and other adults can encourage safer Internet use….

The study, published in the January issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, shows adult supervision of MySpace can raise adolescents' awareness of how accessible their pages are, she said.

The researchers first located 190 MySpace public profiles in a single urban ZIP code, randomly selected from the 10 U.S. Census areas with the lowest average income because researchers wanted to target adolescents who might have less access to doctors….

All the users said on their profiles they were 18 to 20 years old and their pages included three or more references to sex, drinking, drug use or smoking.

…After three months, 42 percent of those getting a "Dr. Meg" e-mail had either set their profiles to "private," meaning only people they'd chosen as MySpace "friends" could view it, or they removed references to sex or substance use. Only 29 percent of those in the group who had not been contacted by Dr. Meg made such changes over the three-month period.

Ingenious!