Adolescent Online Safety

I have to say that examining adolescent online safety has really brought me back to my true passion, which is making a difference in the world. I like doing research from the academic perspective, but sometimes I feel disillusioned when our research doesn’t actually touch the real world. When I talk about my research, I can engage every day people, not just PhDs.  I think that it very cool. And, I am very thankful I have had the opportunity to take this path and the chance to network with other researchers who share the same passion.  I recently broadened my horizons by attending two new conferences:

21st Annual Symposium on Family Issues: This conference is held at Penn State, and it is comprised mostly of researchers from Human Development and Family Studies (HDFS) and other social science disciplines.  So, at first, many of the participants were confused why someone from Information Sciences and Technology was there. 🙂 This year’s symposium focused on the impact of inequality on family outcomes. It raised some provocative questions as the gap between the have and the have nots seems to be widening every day.

Family Online Safety Institute 2013 Annual Conference: This conference was recently held in Washington, D.C. and brought together industry vendors, non-profit organizations, and researchers to discuss the challenges faced by families in an always connected world. It struck me to see the dichotomy between the different online safety interventions provided by the various vendors (FCC, mobile providers, cable providers, etc.) and the research on family safety (Pew Research, EU Kids Online, etc.).  Many of the interventions seemed to lack an evidence-based approach to assess the effectiveness of the interventions.  And, much of the research presented at the conference tended to focus on understanding the prevalence of the problem, instead of focusing on solutions.  I think it is great that the community has already done so much to address this problem;  however, I see great opportunities facilitated by FOSI to bring these two sides together to collaboratively address the problem.

Soon, we will be launching an online dairy study that captures the online risks teens are exposed to over the course of two months.  This is going to be quite the adventure since I haven’t seen any longitudinal research studies like ours . . .