Understanding Digital Citizenship: Children and Young People’s Use of Digital Technology in Their Everyday Lives

• In Event: Exploring Digital Citizenship Education: Comparative Perspectives From Five Nations

Abstract

The study aims to develop significant knowledge about how children and young people use and are affected by technological transformations in their everyday lives, by focusing on family, leisure time, education and children and young people’s civic participation as digital citizens.   



Empirically, the term digital citizenship has been co-opted by a range of stakeholders, from governments and organizations at transnational and national levels to scholars and academic work. Coined by Ribble et al. (2004), digital citizenship first denoted understanding of and protection against risks to be encountered online but was soon extended also to include opportunities for social, economic and political online participation (Mossberger et al., 2007). From these initial contributions and through an array of frameworks and typologies following over the last two decades to describe the characteristics of digital citizenship and how it can be learned and improved, no theoretical consensus on the term has been reached (Richardson et al., 2021; Cortesi et al., 2020). One reason for this lack of a unified concept for digital citizenship may be found in the already existing debates surrounding the original and dynamic concept of citizenship and what it means to be a member of a community in terms of rights and responsibilities towards fellow citizens and, ultimately the state.  



Further, there is a tendency for current digital citizenship research to be siloed within disciplinary confines. Various scholarly disciplines (education, psychology, media and technology, etc.) have emphasized different aspects of digital citizenship (Chen et al.,2021). Frameworks for digital citizenship often conflate these entities or regroup them under headlines, confusing hierarchy and order. Digital citizenship is, therefore, not clearly distinguishable from the empirical use of collective terms like digital literacy, [new] media literacy and digital competence.  



This study is conceptualized around Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory (EST) by focusing on the ways in which digital citizenship is enacted by children and young people across several European countries and this presentation will focus on data from Norway. EST highlights how children and young people’s development is contingent on context and attention to the agency that children and young people have (Bronfenbrenner, 2005, 2006).  



The approach included the use of participatory methodologies, focusing on children and young people (5-18 years of age) with quantitative and qualitative data. The data were analyzed using the Youth Digital Citizenship Scale (Kim & Choi, 2018). The S.A.F.E. framework by Kim and Choi (2018) includes the following dimensions: Self-identity, Activity in online spaces, Fluency for digital environment and Ethics for digital environment.  



The results show that EST was insufficient, which led to the use of a networked ecological systems model (Neal & Neal, 2013), which enables a better understanding of children’s and young people’s use of digital technology in different domains or microsystems of their everyday life and the ambition of developing digital citizenship as suggested by Kim and Choi (2018) within each of these microsystems.  

Author

• Halla B. Holmarsdottir, Oslo Metropolitan University