TC: Small: MySpace Generation's Online Safety: Adolescent Attitude and Behavior, Parental Mediation, and Educational Intervention

The general objective of this research is to address the challenges of protecting adolescent online safety. This work proposes a set of research activities to investigate three aspects of online safety issues for the adolescent cohort: conceptualization, intervention, and education. The specific goals are to: 1) conceptualize information privacy for the adolescent cohort; 2) assess the effectiveness of parental mediation strategies; and 3) generate design recommendations for effective designs of online safety awareness and training programs. The intellectual merit of this work lies in both the strength of the interdisciplinary project team and the significance of the problem addressed. The team includes a broad range of expertise in the domains of information privacy and security, psychology, human-computer interaction, and family and youth resiliency and policy. This work will offer new insights that can address the issues of protecting children online safety as well as study the human-computer and human-human (parent-child) interactions that are aware of the well-being of families.

The findings will have a broader impact in increasing the online safety of adolescents. This work includes significant community outreach and dissemination, involving parents and adolescents from a wide demographic variety in terms of gender, income, ethnicity, and rurality. The proposed intervention approaches will strengthen the trust within parent-child relationship, by enabling parents to show empathy with a child's perspective, and provide choices and options whenever possible. This work will be the first step towards a more ambitious research and intervention project that the team plans to develop in collaboration with national non-profit organizations.