Adolescent Social Networking Activities: What Adults Don’t Know Elizabeth Langran
This study explores the area of parental involvement in their children’s Internet activities. The purpose of this study is to answer three questions: “to what extent are an adolescent’s social networking activities different from his or her parent’s perceptions of the child’s activities, what characterizes parent-child pairs who have the highest and lowest agreement on the responses regarding the child’s social networking activities and communications on internet-usage rules, and are schools playing any role in advocating responsible online behavior?” They collected the data by using two online surveys, one for parents and one for adolescents. The number of participants in this study was very small. The results indicate that there are parents who are very award of their children’s online activities. This was dependent on how active the children were online. As adolescents became more active online, parents may become less aware of their child’s activity. The study also indicates that 23.4% of surveyed adolescents would not tell their parent if they were in trouble and jumped to 46.7% of the “low-correlation” pairs. Low-correlation is defined as parent-child pairs who had a low level of agreement in survey responses. Therefore rules are not enough to keep adolescent safe online because the adolescents are not following the rules as much as the parents think they are. Schools are also an important part of online safety by providing Internet safety instruction. Of the adolescents surveyed 82.9% had discussions with teachers about social networking. The study indicated that a larger study should be conducted with more probing questions.
What Adults Don’t Know
Elizabeth Langran
This study explores the area of parental involvement in their children’s Internet activities. The purpose of this study is to answer three questions: “to what extent are an adolescent’s social networking activities different from his or her parent’s perceptions of the child’s activities, what characterizes parent-child pairs who have the highest and lowest agreement on the responses regarding the child’s social networking activities and communications on internet-usage rules, and are schools playing any role in advocating responsible online behavior?” They collected the data by using two online surveys, one for parents and one for adolescents. The number of participants in this study was very small. The results indicate that there are parents who are very award of their children’s online activities. This was dependent on how active the children were online. As adolescents became more active online, parents may become less aware of their child’s activity. The study also indicates that 23.4% of surveyed adolescents would not tell their parent if they were in trouble and jumped to 46.7% of the “low-correlation” pairs. Low-correlation is defined as parent-child pairs who had a low level of agreement in survey responses. Therefore rules are not enough to keep adolescent safe online because the adolescents are not following the rules as much as the parents think they are. Schools are also an important part of online safety by providing Internet safety instruction. Of the adolescents surveyed 82.9% had discussions with teachers about social networking. The study indicated that a larger study should be conducted with more probing questions.