A little meeting with Netsafe
So last week Friday I met up with Edgar, who is the head of research for Netsafe. Unfortunately, since he is currently based in Wellington, we were unable to meet up face to face, but thank goodness we have technology so we could skype. Ā
Firstly, we talked about current research. At this point, Netsafe is currently completing two research projects. Edgar was able to provide me an outline of the two projects, but said that the results that were obtained could not be released to me until the government departments released this knowledge to the public. Hereās a quick breakdown of the two projects:
The first has already been conducted, and it should (hopefully) be released in the next month or two. This survey asked a variety of people aged 18 years and older about their use of the internet, the digital harms they experienced and so forth. This was quite a large survey, so it measures general New Zealand, but does not include children under the age of 18, which is what my focus will be. I look forward to seeing these results.
The second is an online survey about how young people (aged 16-17 due to ethics issues) use technology and experience online harm. I wroteĀ āfocus groupsā down on my notes, but I think this was an idea going forward instead of what they were doing. Now hopefully the results of this survey will be released ASAP as this would directly benefit me into answering theĀ āwhatā of my question - ie. what are the dangers? Now onto the why.
Afterwards, I told Edgar a brief outline of what I was interested in doing - understanding the why - Why are these dangers there? Is it due to children having not developed risk management yet? Is it just a part of society? Is there some other psychological reasoning behind it? Edgar offered some interesting suggestions. The most important advice he gave was:
Narrow your question. Narrow your group. Choose a methodology correct for you.
Due to ethics, he suggested I take the age group of 16-17, as they had done with their studies, or an early adult stage (ie 18-20). He also offered potential narrowed questions, such as looking at school leavers and their transition to university and how they may experience a new form of harm. He also suggested potentially looking at peopleās resilience when experiencing online harm, and what they put in place for prevention and when it happens. He suggested since I was askingĀ āWhy?ā that I might want to conduct about 10-20 interviews and take a more qualitative approach rather than a quantitative approach.
Lastly, we talked about what current literature was out there surrounding this area, and boy, even though I have a thick file full of readings, there really isnāt too many published readings.
He has suggested I look at these:
https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/2292/31608/SSOwithcoversheet.pdf?sequence=39
http://ctichota.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/69625262/Traditional%20Bullying%20and%20Cyber%20Bullying.pdf
https://cdn.auckland.ac.nz/assets/psych/about/our-research/nzavs/Feedback%20Reports/NZAVS-Policy-Brief-Rate-of-Cyber-Bullying.pdf (note that this report includes data from 18yo and older).
There are some international authors you might need to read to have an idea of young peopleās online behavior and experiences of harm. See the work of Sonia Livingstone, Danah Boyd and Jean Twenge, for example.
Some journals you can have a look: Journal of Adolescence, Journal of Youth Studies, Social Psychology of Education, New Media and Society, Information Communication and Society, Computer in Human Behaviour, Social Science Computer Review.
Searching on government agenciesā websites (e.g. Ministry of Education) is also a good strategy.
I hope that in the end, my research will be helpful to the community and that we can move on forward in digital harm and preventing it. I also hope to publish a paper at the end of my thesis so that this information can be out there and available to others.
