Technological Innovation and Social Change

European Research on Cultural, Contextual and Risk Issues in Children's Safe
Use of the Internet and New Media.

(see What is Safer Internet?)"

Repository of research on children and the Internet in Europe

a database of recent and ongoing empirical projects
regarding children and the Internet in Europe. Our aim is to provide a public
resource for researchers and practitioners in this field in which studies are
identified and information about them can be readily searched and accessed.

• Research on younger (primary school) children
• Research on platforms other than the fixed internet
• Research on peer-to-peer applications
• Research on children’s perceptions of online risk
• Research on children’s coping with risk, including media literacy
• Research on parents’ coping with risk, including parental mediation and use of filtering or other safety tools
• Research on the effectiveness of parental mediation/use of safety tools
• Research on online risk to children in certain countries
• Research on certain types of risk (commercial risk, user-generated content, suicide or self harm sites.

• Research in this field becomes quickly out of date and findings must be regularly updated
• We greatly need multi-national research, so one country may learn from another, while recognising the specificities of diverse economic, cultural and social contexts
• Tracking studies are required to understand the long-term implications of online technologies
• The research agenda does not always suit the needs of the policy agenda, and it is more common to identify problems than to evaluate policy solutions.
• Second, regarding the theories, methods and standards of research -
• We advocate multiple theoretical perspectives, so the various dimensions of children’s internet use can be understood in relation to children’s own perceptions, those of their parents, and the context of everyday internet use
• Although multidisciplinary, multimethod, contextual, and longitudinal research is particularly demanding, it remains sorely needed
• Research is sometimes poorly reported, with key information missing, or it is difficult to gain access to – the quality, rigour and public accessibility of some research could be improved
• Nearly all research online activities and risks neglects children's lives offline (e.g. their social networks, their parenting, their attitudes to risk-taking or coping with psychological distress).

• The risk agenda is led largely led by adult concerns and media-spread moral panics, and so focuses on pornography, stranger contact, violence etc.
• It is insufficiently led by objective evidence of actual harm, whether criminal (e.g. incidence of sexual abuse or criminal abduction) or medical (e.g. incidence of youth suicide or self harm attempts)
• It is also insufficiently reflective of children and young people's own agenda of concerns (in which bullying, identity abuse, spam and race hate would figure much higher than pornography or even stranger danger)
• Research and policy often underestimates the ways in which it is inherent to childhood and especially adolescence to take risks, push boundaries and evade adult scrutiny.
• The pressing need for more research on younger children raises significant challenges regarding methodology and research ethics
• More discrimination is needed regarding the nature of children's online activities, including they ways in which they differentiate different kinds of pornographic or violent content or potentially harmful contact.

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