Our research aims to highlight and alleviate the complex tensions around online safety, privacy, and smartphone usage in families so that parents and teens can work together to better manage mobile privacy and security-related risks. We developed a mobile application ("app") for Community Oversight of Privacy and Security ("CO-oPS") and had parents and teens assess whether it would be applicable for use with their families. CO-oPS is an Android app that allows a group of users to co-monitor the apps installed on one another's devices and the privacy permissions granted to those apps. We conducted a study with 19 parent-teen (ages 13-17) pairs to understand how they currently managed mobile safety and app privacy within their family and then had them install, use, and evaluate the CO-oPS app. We found that both parents and teens gave little consideration to online safety and privacy before installing new apps or granting privacy permissions. When using CO-oPS, participants liked how the app increased transparency into one another's devices in a way that facilitated communication, but were less inclined to use features for in-app messaging or to hide apps from one another. Key themes related to power imbalances between parents and teens surfaced that made co-management challenging. Parents were more open to collaborative oversight than teens, who felt that it was not their place to monitor their parents, even though both often believed parents lacked the technological expertise to monitor themselves. Our study sheds light on why collaborative practices for managing online safety and privacy within families may be beneficial but also quite difficult to implement in practice. We provide recommendations for overcoming these challenges based on the insights gained from our study.
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Family Tensions and Information Privacy: A Barrier to Diffusion of Proximity Tracing Applications?
Technology played a central role during the pandemic for communications and services. It was also touted as a potential solution to control the spread of COVID-19 via proximity tracing applications, also known as contact tracing (CT) apps worldwide. In non-mandated settings, however, these apps did not attain popularity. Privacy concerns were highlighted as one reason. We explored how family perceptions of CT apps can affect the family’s use of such apps. We surveyed parent-teen dyads twice over a 5-month period. We analyzed parent-teen perceptions of each other’s intentions and use of CT apps at time 1 and 2, exploring changes over time. Parents’ use intentions were influenced by their and their teens’ perceptions of the benefits but not privacy concerns. Teen intentions were influenced by their own perceptions of benefits, not their parent’s, and their parent’s concerns for the family. Intentions always influenced usage, including intentions at time 1 influencing use at time 2, demonstrating a longitudinal effect of intentions on usage existed for parents and teens.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2039172
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10354273
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
- ISSN:
- 1060-3425
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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The Study on U.S. Parents’ Divisions of Labor During COVID-19 (SPDLC) collects longitudinal survey data from partnered U.S. parents that can be used to assess changes in parents’ divisions of domestic labor, divisions of paid labor, and well-being throughout and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of SPDLC is to understand both the short- and long-term impacts of the pandemic for the gendered division of labor, work-family issues, and broader patterns of gender inequality.
Survey data for this study is collected using Prolifc (www.prolific.co), an opt-in online platform designed to facilitate scientific research. The sample is comprised U.S. adults who were residing with a romantic partner and at least one biological child (at the time of entry into the study). In each survey, parents answer questions about both themselves and their partners. Wave 1 of SPDLC was conducted in April 2020, and parents who participated in Wave 1 were asked about their division of labor both prior to (i.e., early March 2020) and one month after the pandemic began. Wave 2 of SPDLC was collected in November 2020. Parents who participated in Wave 1 were invited to participate again in Wave 2, and a new cohort of parents was also recruited to participate in the Wave 2 survey. Wave 3 of SPDLC was collected in October 2021. Parents who participated in either of the first two waves were invited to participate again in Wave 3, and another new cohort of parents was also recruited to participate in the Wave 3 survey. This research design (follow-up survey of panelists and new cross-section of parents at each wave) will continue through 2024, culminating in six waves of data spanning the period from March 2020 through October 2024. An estimated total of approximately 6,500 parents will be surveyed at least once throughout the duration of the study.
SPDLC data will be released to the public two years after data is collected; Waves 1 and 2 are currently publicly available. Wave 3 will be publicly available in October 2023, with subsequent waves becoming available yearly. Data will be available to download in both SPSS (.sav) and Stata (.dta) formats, and the following data files will be available: (1) a data file for each individual wave, which contains responses from all participants in that wave of data collection, (2) a longitudinal panel data file, which contains longitudinal follow-up data from all available waves, and (3) a repeated cross-section data file, which contains the repeated cross-section data (from new respondents at each wave) from all available waves. Codebooks for each survey wave and a detailed user guide describing the data are also available. Response Rates: Of the 1,157 parents who participated in Wave 1, 828 (72%) also participated in the Wave 2 study. Presence of Common Scales: The following established scales are included in the survey:- Self-Efficacy, adapted from Pearlin's mastery scale (Pearlin et al., 1981) and the Rosenberg self-esteem scale (Rosenberg, 2015) and taken from the American Changing Lives Survey
- Communication with Partner, taken from the Marriage and Relationship Survey (Lichter & Carmalt, 2009)
- Gender Attitudes, taken from the National Survey of Families and Households (Sweet & Bumpass, 1996)
- Depressive Symptoms (CES-D-10)
- Stress, measured using Cohen's Perceived Stress Scale (Cohen, Kamarck, & Mermelstein, 1983)
The second wave of the SPDLC was fielded in November 2020 in two stages. In the first stage, all parents who participated in W1 of the SPDLC and who continued to reside in the United States were re-contacted and asked to participate in a follow-up survey. The W2 survey was posted on Prolific, and messages were sent via Prolific’s messaging system to all previous participants. Multiple follow-up messages were sent in an attempt to increase response rates to the follow-up survey. Of the 1,157 respondents who completed the W1 survey, 873 at least started the W2 survey. Data quality checks were employed in line with best practices for online surveys (e.g., removing respondents who did not complete most of the survey or who did not pass the attention filters). After data quality checks, 5.2% of respondents were removed from the sample, resulting in a final sample size of 828 parents (a response rate of 72%).
In the second stage, a new sample of parents was recruited. New parents had to meet the same sampling criteria as in W1 (be at least 18 years old, reside in the United States, reside with a romantic partner, and be a parent living with at least one biological child). Also similar to the W1 procedures, we oversampled men, Black individuals, individuals who did not complete college, and individuals who identified as politically conservative to increase sample diversity. A total of 1,207 parents participated in the W2 survey. Data quality checks led to the removal of 5.7% of the respondents, resulting in a final sample size of new respondents at Wave 2 of 1,138 parents.
In both stages, participants were informed that the survey would take approximately 20 minutes to complete. All panelists were provided monetary compensation in line with Prolific’s compensation guidelines, which require that all participants earn above minimum wage for their time participating in studies.
To be included in SPDLC, respondents had to meet the following sampling criteria at the time they enter the study: (a) be at least 18 years old, (b) reside in the United States, (c) reside with a romantic partner (i.e., be married or cohabiting), and (d) be a parent living with at least one biological child. Follow-up respondents must be at least 18 years old and reside in the United States, but may experience changes in relationship and resident parent statuses. Smallest Geographic Unit: U.S. StateThis work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. In accordance with this license, all users of these data must give appropriate credit to the authors in any papers, presentations, books, or other works that use the data. A suggested citation to provide attribution for these data is included below:
To help provide estimates that are more representative of U.S. partnered parents, the SPDLC includes sampling weights. Weights can be included in statistical analyses to make estimates from the SPDLC sample representative of U.S. parents who reside with a romantic partner (married or cohabiting) and a child aged 18 or younger based on age, race/ethnicity, and gender. National estimates for the age, racial/ethnic, and gender profile of U.S. partnered parents were obtained using data from the 2020 Current Population Survey (CPS). Weights were calculated using an iterative raking method, such that the full sample in each data file matches the nationally representative CPS data in regard to the gender, age, and racial/ethnic distributions within the data. This variable is labeled CPSweightW2 in the Wave 2 dataset, and CPSweightLW2 in the longitudinal dataset (which includes Waves 1 and 2). There is not a weight variable included in the W1-W2 repeated cross-section data file.
Carlson, Daniel L. and Richard J. Petts. 2022. Study on U.S. Parents’ Divisions of Labor During COVID-19 User Guide: Waves 1-2.
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.24251/HICSS.2022.066
