P011 - Child Online Safety and Age-Related Digital Environmental Trust Cues: Using Triangulated, Experimental Study Designs to Create Safer Online Spaces for Children Away From Predatory Adults.

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Abstract

For social media, there are fewer social norms surrounding boundaries between adults socializing with children compared to the real world. Additionally, for non-digital spaces, there are other social norms, expressing the unacceptability of child abuse, whereas, in certain social media environments, such norms are lacking. The prior statements are examples of how social media can foster a greater opportunity for adult deviancy towards children. For the rest of my PhD, the aim is to consider how to create online environmental trust cues, which can deter adult online predators, but not children, from child-aimed social media spaces. Environmental trust cues are aspects of the digital environment, whether that be the appearance or language of the social media environment as instances, which invoke trust surrounding the digital space within the individual. Investigating digital trust environmental cue variation among adults and children includes thinking around cognitive differences, as well as socialized digital variance between adults and children. Cases of variables, which can be presented through digital environmental features, for manipulation of trust include risk perception variety among children & cognitively developed adults (age 25 and up) and socialized differences surrounding digital privacy between adults & children. Researcher-created social media spaces will be created to gauge differences in digital trust for one variable at a time among adult and child participants, along with other forms of variable-dependent testing for triangulation, such as eye-tracking data. Differences in environmental trust cues between adults and children, identified by the previous experiments, will then be brought together in a singular social media simulation to gauge any differences in digital behaviour between adults and children due to trust. The results of the final study will be triangulated by eye-tracking data and follow-up interviews to confirm whether adults can be deterred from child-aimed social media without impacting children's online experiences.

Author

• Catherine Louise Bostock, University of Bristol