skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Conducting Risky Research with Teens: Co-designing for the Ethical Treatment and Protection of Adolescents
The methods in which we study the online experiences of adolescents should be evidence-based and informed by youth. This is especially true when studying sensitive topics, such as the online risk behaviors of minors. We directly engaged 20 adolescents (ages 12-18) in the co-design of two different research methodologies (i.e., diary studies and analyzing social media trace data) for conducting adolescent online safety research. We also interviewed 13 of their parents to understand their perspectives. Overall, teens wanted to share their personal experiences and benefit society, while parents wanted researchers to tackle a topic that they felt was a prevalent problem for teens. Yet, they both had significant concerns regarding data privacy of the sensitive disclosures made by teens during such studies. Teens' feared getting in trouble. Participants emphasized the importance of developing a trusting relationship with the researcher to overcome these concerns. Participants also saw the potential for using the research study as a tool for risk-reporting and mitigation, where researchers could act as liaisons between the teens and other parties (e.g., counselors, law enforcement, parents) to share pertinent risk details and facilitate resources or even help teens directly by giving them strategies for mitigating online risks they encountered during the study. Our research delves into important ethical considerations for conducting risk-focused research with adolescents and uncovers the critical need for designing risk-based research for youth protection. We provide researchers with heuristic guidelines for conducting ethical research with vulnerable populations (i.e., adolescents) and keeping participants safe while doing so.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1844881 1827700
PAR ID:
10213816
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Volume:
4
Issue:
CSCW3
ISSN:
2573-0142
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 46
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; (, Networked Privacy Workshop of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)
    Future online safety technologies should consider the privacy needs of adolescents (ages 13-17) and support their ability to self-regulate their online behaviors and navigate online risks. To do this, adolescent online safety researchers and practitioners must shift towards solutions that are more teen-centric by designing privacy-preserving online safety solutions for teens. In this paper, we discuss privacy challenges we have encountered in conducting adolescent online safety research. We discuss privacy concerns of teens in regard to sharing their private social media data with researchers and potentially taking part in a user study where they share some of this information with their parents. Our research emphasizes a need for more privacy-preserving interventions for teens. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; (, Towards Conducting Responsible Research with Teens and Parents regarding Online Risks)
    We conducted an exploratory interview study with 10 undergraduate college students (ages 18-21) to get their feedback on how to best design a research study that asks teens (ages 13-17) to share portions of their Instagram data with their parents and discuss their online risk experiences. These young adults felt that teens should have as much control as possible when sharing their data, including the way that it was used in discussions with their parents. Our findings highlight the need to ensure researchers preserve the privacy and confidentiality of teens’ social media data. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; ; (, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)
    Research involving sensitive data often leads to valuable human-centered insights. Yet, the effects of participating in and conducting research about sensitive data with youth are poorly understood. We conducted meta-level research to improve our understanding of these effects. We did the following: (i) asked youth (aged 13-21) to share their private Instagram Direct Messages (DMs) and flag their unsafe DMs; (ii) interviewed 30 participants about the experience of reflecting on this sensitive data; (iii) interviewed research assistants (RAs, n=12) about their experience analyzing youth's data. We found that reflecting about DMs brought discomfort for participants and RAs, although both benefited from increasing their awareness about online risks, their behavior, and privacy and social media practices. Participants had high expectations for safeguarding their private data while their concerns were mitigated by the potential to improve online safety. We provide implications for ethical research practices and the development of reflective practices among participants and RAs through applying trauma-informed principles to HCI research. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; ; (, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)
    Sexual exploration is a natural part of adolescent development; yet, unmediated internet access has enabled teens to engage in a wider variety of potentially riskier sexual interactions than previous generations, from normatively appropriate sexual interactions to sexually abusive situations. Teens have turned to online peer support platforms to disclose and seek support about these experiences. Therefore, we analyzed posts (N=45,955) made by adolescents (ages 13--17) on an online peer support platform to deeply examine their online sexual risk experiences. By applying a mixed methods approach, we 1) accurately (average of AUC = 0.90) identified posts that contained teen disclosures about online sexual risk experiences and classified the posts based on level of consent (i.e., consensual, non-consensual, sexual abuse) and relationship type (i.e., stranger, dating/friend, family) between the teen and the person in which they shared the sexual experience, 2) detected statistically significant differences in the proportions of posts based on these dimensions, and 3) further unpacked the nuance in how these online sexual risk experiences were typically characterized in the posts. Teens were significantly more likely to engage in consensual sexting with friends/dating partners; unwanted solicitations were more likely from strangers and sexual abuse was more likely when a family member was involved. We contribute to the HCI and CSCW literature around youth online sexual risk experiences by moving beyond the false dichotomy of "safe" versus "risky". Our work provides a deeper understanding of technology-mediated adolescent sexual behaviors from the perspectives of sexual well-being, risk detection, and the prevention of online sexual violence toward youth. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; (, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)
    Adolescent online safety researchers have emphasized the importance of moving beyond restrictive and privacy invasive approaches to online safety, towards resilience-based approaches for empowering teens to deal with online risks independently. Unfortunately, many of the existing online safety interventions are focused on parental mediation and not contextualized to teens' personal experiences online; thus, they do not effectively cater to the unique needs of teens. To better understand how we might design online safety interventions that help teens deal with online risks, as well as when and how to intervene, we must include teens as partners in the design process and equip them with the skills needed to contribute equally to the design process. As such, we conducted User Experience (UX) bootcamps with 21 teens (ages 13-17) to first teach them important UX design skills using industry standard tools, so they could create storyboards for unsafe online interactions commonly experienced by teens and high-fidelity, interactive prototypes for dealing with these situations. Based on their storyboards, teens often encountered information breaches and sexual risks with strangers, as well as cyberbullying from acquaintances or friends. While teens often blocked or reported strangers, they struggled with responding to risks from friends or acquaintances, seeking advice from others on the best action to take. Importantly, teens did not find any of the existing ways for responding to these risks to be effective in keeping them safe. When asked to create their own design-based interventions, teens frequently envisioned nudges that occurred in real-time. Interestingly, teens more often designed for risk prevention (rather than risk coping) by focusing on nudging the risk perpetrator (rather than the victim) to rethink their actions, block harmful actions from occurring, or penalizing perpetrators for inappropriate behavior to prevent it from happening again in the future. Teens also designed personalized sensitivity filters to provide teens the ability to manage content they wanted to see online. Some teens also designed personalized nudges, so that teens could receive intelligent, guided advice from the platform that would help them know how to handle online risks themselves without intervention from their parents. Our findings highlight how teens want to address online risks at the root by putting the onus of risk prevention on those who perpetrate them - rather than on the victim. Our work is the first to leverage co-design with teens to develop novel online safety interventions that advocate for a paradigm shift from youth risk protection to promoting good digital citizenship. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email