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.


  • NSF Public Access
  • Search Results
  • Sensemaking, Support, Safety, Retribution, Transformation: A Restorative Justice Approach to Understanding Adolescents’ Needs for Addressing Online Harm
Title: Sensemaking, Support, Safety, Retribution, Transformation: A Restorative Justice Approach to Understanding Adolescents’ Needs for Addressing Online Harm
Online harm is a prevalent issue in adolescents’ online lives. Restorative justice teaches us to focus on those who have been harmed, ask what their needs are, and engage in the offending party and community members to collectively address the harm. In this research, we conducted interviews and design activities with harmed adolescents to understand their needs to address online harm. They also identified the key stakeholders relevant to their needs, the desired outcomes, and the preferred timing to achieve them. We identified five central needs of harmed adolescents: sensemaking, emotional support and validation, safety, retribution, and transformation. We find that addressing the needs of those who are harmed online usually requires concerted efforts from multiple stakeholders online and offline. We conclude by discussing how platforms can implement design interventions to meet some of these needs.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1948067
PAR ID:
10411312
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
CHI '22: Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 15
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; (, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)
    When bereaved individuals seek online support in response to the suicide of a loved one, their expressions of grief take many forms. Although the intense grief expressions individuals bereaved by suicide commonly share in private therapeutic settings can be helpful in healing from traumatic loss, these same expressions may potentially cause harm to others when shared in a public online support community. In this study, we present a qualitative analysis of letters posted on the r/SuicideBereavement subreddit, and comments replying to those posts, to explore what diverse expressions of grief additionally demand of platform design. We find that letter posts contain potentially harmful grief expressions that, in this community, generate mutual support among community members. Informed by our findings, this study considers the design challenges for online platforms as they simultaneously support users receiving support and healing through sharing certain grief expressions, while also supporting users who will be harmed by exposure to those grief expressions. Taking inspiration from offline therapy modalities, we consider the design implications of creating specialized online grief support spaces for diverse grief expressions. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; (, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)
    With the prevalence of risks encountered by youth online, strength-based approaches such as nudges have been recommended as potential solutions to guide teens toward safer decisions. However, most nudging interventions to date have not been designed to cater to teens' unique needs and online safety concerns. To address this gap, this study provided a comprehensive view of adolescents' feedback on online safety nudges to inform the design of more effective online safety interventions. We conducted 12 semi-structured interviews and 3 focus group sessions with 21 teens (13 - 17 years old) via Zoom to get their feedback on three types of nudge designs from two opposing perspectives (i.e., risk victim and perpetrator) and for two different online risks (i.e., Information Breaches and Cyberbullying). Based on the teens' responses, they expressed a desire that nudges need to move beyond solely warning the user to providing a clear and effective action to take in response to the risk. They also identified key differences that affect the perception of nudges in effectively addressing an online risk, they include age, risk medium, risk awareness, and perceived risk severity. Finally, the teens identified several challenges with nudges such as them being easy to ignore, disruptive, untimely, and possibly escalating the risk. To address these, teens recommended clearer and contextualized warnings, risk prevention, and nudge personalization as solutions to ensure effective nudging. Overall, we recommend online safety nudges be designed for victim guidance while providing autonomy to control their experiences, and to ensure accountability and prevention of risk perpetrators to restrict them from causing harm. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting)
    null (Ed.)
    Background: Online challenges, phenomena that are very familiar to adolescents and young adults who spend large portions of time on social media, range from minimally harmful behaviors intended to support philanthropic endeavors to significantly harmful behaviors that may culminate in injury or death. Objective: This study investigated the beliefs that lead adolescents and young adults to participate in these activities by analyzing the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Ice Bucket Challenge (IBC) to represent the former and the Cinnamon Challenge (CC), the latter. Methods: We conducted a retrospective quantitative study with a total of 471 participants between the ages of 13 and 35 who either had participated in the ALS IBC or the CC or had never participated in any online challenge. We used binomial logistic regression models to classify those who participated in ALS IBC or CC versus those who didn’t with the beliefs from the Integrated Behavioral Model (IBM) as predictors. Results: Our findings showed that both CC and ALS IBC participants had significantly greater positive emotional responses, value for the outcomes of the challenge, and expectation of the public to participate in the challenge in comparison to individuals who never participated in any challenge. In addition, only CC participants perceived positive public opinion about the challenge and perceived the challenge to be easy with no harmful consequences, in comparison to individuals who never participated in any challenge. Conclusions: The constructs that contribute to the spread of online challenge vary based on the level of self-harm involved in it and its purpose. We recommend that intervention efforts be tailored to address the beliefs associated with different types of online challenges. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)
    We conducted a study with 173 adolescents (ages 13-21), who self-reported their offline and online risk experiences and uploaded their Instagram data to our study website to flag private conversations as unsafe. Risk profiles were first created based on the survey data and then compared with the risk-flagged social media data. Five risk profiles emerged: Low Risks (51% of the participants), Medium Risks (29%), Increased Sexting (8%), Increased Self-Harm (8%), and High Risk Perpetration (4%). Overall, the profiles correlated well with the social media data with the highest level of risk occurring in the three smallest profiles. Youth who experienced increased sexting and self-harm frequently reported engaging in unsafe sexual conversations. Meanwhile, high risk perpetration was characterized by increased violence, threats, and sales/promotion of illegal activities. A key insight from our study was that offline risk behavior sometimes manifested differently in online contexts (i.e., offline self-harm as risky online sexual interactions). Our findings highlight the need for targeted risk prevention strategies for youth online safety. 
    more » « less
  5. ; (, Proceedings of the ASEE Annual Conference and Exhibition)
    Empathy is vital to ethical, effective design, yet vexing to teach. While research suggests empathy can be developed through human-centered design, students still tend to narrowly scope design problems, ignore the heterogeneity of the stakeholders, and focus on only mainstream or very few individuals with specific needs. While engineering education has come to value empathy, literature suggests that we still have a very limited understanding of its nuances. We address this issue by introducing the construct expansive empathy, which we define as the ability to understand and generate inclusive design solutions that incorporate the complex interactions among the engineering system and the needs of diverse stakeholders, including those who are marginalized, mainstreamed, and vulnerable. We adapted the Interpersonal Reactivity Index to develop a measure to capture expansive empathy and performed an exploratory factor analysis. We examined factor structure using data collected at the beginning of a senior design class. Initial results suggest that students have not developed expansive empathy in their previous engineering courses. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email