Volume 39, Issue 3

Previous research on youths’ online risky experiences has mostly utilized quantitative designs. However, some of this research does not account for youths’ views and perceptions. This qualitative study fills this gap by describing online problematic situations from the perspectives of European youths, focuses on classifying online problematic situations based on youths’ perspectives and interrelates these with their developmental contexts. As a theoretical framework, the co-construction model was adopted, which proposes that youths’ online and offline worlds are interconnected. Interviews and focus groups were conducted with youths between the ages of 9 and 16 from Belgium, the Czech Republic, Greece, Malta, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Youths’ responses reflected the complexity of the various problematic situations online they encountered or indirectly experienced, and how such experiences were interconnected with the developmental contexts of peer relationships, parent-child relationships, romantic relationships, school, sexuality, identity, health, and morality. We recommend the development of complex educational programs focused on youths about problematic situations online, which discuss the possible situations they may encounter and how to deal with them.

This article maps the various preventive measures 9 to 16-year-olds may take when confronted with problematic online situations, and it assesses how they differentiate preventive strategies based on online risk types. Boys and girls are compared and potential changes in preventive measures as they grow older are discussed. The reality of preventive measures is complex: Young people adopt different types of preventive measures depending on the perceived seriousness and potential harm of the risky situation at hand. Proactive problem-preventing measures are favored while support seeking is clearly a less common strategy in preventing unpleasant situations online. Cognitive strategies such as planning, strategizing and reflecting are also quite common among children’s intent on avoiding risky online experiences, and they can spur them on from mere awareness to concrete preventive action.

The widespread use of social network sites (SNSs) by children has significantly reconfigured how they communicate, with whom and with what consequences. This article analyzes cross-national interviews and focus groups to explore the risky opportunities children experience online. It introduces the notion of social media literacy and examines how children learn to interpret and engage with the technological and textual affordances and social dimensions of SNSs in determining what is risky and why. Informed by media literacy research, a social developmental pathway is proposed according to which children are first recipients, then participants, and finally actors in their social media worlds. The findings suggest that SNSs face children (aged approximately 9–11) with the fundamental question of what is real or fake. By around 11–13, they are more absorbed by the question of what is fun, even if it is transgressive or fake. By age 14–16, the increasing complexity of their social and emotional lives, as well as their greater maturity, contributes to a refocusing on what is valuable for them. Their changing orientation to social networking online (and offline) appears to be shaped by their changing peer and parental relations, and has implications for their perceptions of risk of harm.

Children’s unpleasant experiences with misuse of their personal information online is among the rapidly increasing online ‘risks’. Among these, four were chosen for this study: dealing with their own hacked accounts, dealing with others’ fake accounts, dealing with fake accounts impersonating them and sending rude messages on their behalf with the intent of damaging their reputation, and dealing with receiving rude messages from hacked accounts of friends were reported as most bothersome in EU Kids Online III. These four subtypes of problematic situations related to privacy were strategically chosen to illustrate children’s coping responses to situations that are related but increasingly complex, distinctions related to whether situations involved peers or strangers, whether children were direct victims of hacked accounts, or recipients of unwelcomed or rude messages sent from fake profiles and/or hacked accounts. Furthermore, the four situations were chosen to develop a more inclusive coping typology for EU Kids Online data, which can span across different types of risks. This article relies heavily on theoretical work put forward by research on coping with general and specific stressors but integrates approaches to children’s dealing with online issues relevant for online safety measures.

The present study focuses on meeting online strangers face-to-face. This activity represents one of the least prevalent but also most feared online risks for youth. Due to the low number of youth experiencing upsetting meetings and the dominance of quantitative research designs in the area, the current state of knowledge does not provide a clear view of what happens at meetings that youths find upsetting. The aim of the present study is to enrich knowledge in this area by exploring such upsetting experiences in more depth by using qualitative methodology. Based on 14 interviews with Czech girls aged 15 to 18, who reported upsetting meetings with online strangers, the study identifies the discrepancy between expectations and reality as the core reason for these negative feelings. There were several reasons for this discrepancy: different developmental phases, related different experiences with romantic relationships, and exaggeration of impressions formed online.

This article explores young children’s moral sensitivity regarding online disclosure. Drawing on psychological theory, moral sensitivity is defined as the ability to express and show moral consideration in terms of empathy, role-taking and pro-social moral reasoning. Twenty-five preadolescent children aged 9 to 11 , all living in Belgium, were asked in focus group interviews to share their reflections about and experiences with self-disclosure and privacy in internet environments. The findings demonstrate that young children are capable of imagining the moral consequences of disclosing personal information about oneself and about others. Their moral reflections are embedded in a more general concern of children’s vulnerability to other, more powerful information circulators in their social networks, such as older children, siblings, but also parents or the internet crowd. A strong sense of children’s entitlements to online privacy is articulated. Also, the decision of disclosing personal information about the other is carefully considered when the other is emotionally important to the children.