Poster #237 - Influence of age and personality on Colombian adolescents’ exposure to and reporting of online risks

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Technology, Media & Child Development

Integrative Statement

Young people’s exposure to various types of risks on the Internet, including interactions with strangers, inappropriate material, and cyberbullying and other forms of online conflict, is an increasing social concern. Consistent findings are that exposure to online risks increases with age and is affected by personality characteristics such as sensation-seeking (Livingstone & Smith, 2014). However, it has been much less common to look at how young people’s own reporting to adults of the risks that they face varies with age and personality, even though effective communication about online risks is vital to helping them confront them. Research on online risks in Colombia and many other Latin American countries is also lacking.
The current study aimed to address these omissions using a survey of 203 Colombian young adolescents (101 female, 84 male), mostly aged between 12-15 years and in 7th or 9th grade. The survey (http://psicologiauniandes.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_daiAO2TRwc1t1it) was administered at two public secondary schools in Bogotá, Colombia, serving mainly low-to-middle-income working families. Hypotheses were pre-registered at http://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=6ci7z7. Age-related hypotheses were that exposure to online risks and online conflicts would rise between 7th and 9th grade, while reporting of risk exposure to adults would fall. For the hypotheses relating to personality, a short but comprehensive Big Five personality test, the TIPI (Gosling, Rentfrow, & Swann, 2003), was administered. Openness to experience was postulated to be associated with more exposure to online risks, conscientiousness with less exposure to online risks and more reporting to adults, extraversion with more reporting of online incidents (especially to peers), agreeableness with fewer arguments and conflicts online, and neuroticism with more concern about online risks.
Results supported all of the age-related hypotheses: 9th-graders were exposed to significantly more online risks and participated in significantly more online conflicts than 7th-graders, while reporting such incidents significantly less often to adults (both parents and teachers). However, the only personality-based hypothesis to be firmly supported was that extraversion would be associated with more reporting of online risks experienced. There was also a marginally significant correlation between openness to experience and exposure to online risk, which did not remain significant following Bonferroni correction. Multiple regressions also showed that demographic factors (age and gender) taken together explained significantly more of the variation in online risk exposure, conflict participation and risk reporting than did personality factors.
Complementing results from studies in many other countries, these results suggest that children reliably go through a phase of increased exposure to online risks and conflicts in early-to-middle adolescence. The fact that this is accompanied by a reduction in reporting of such incidents to adults is concerning. Interventions against online risks could perhaps target the tendency of adolescents to talk things over with peers, since unlike reporting to adults this did not fall between 7th and 9th grade. While more specific personality features such as sensation-seeking may be important, broad personality factors did not seem to be useful for explaining exposure to online risks and conflicts, at least for this population.

Author

• Gordon Ingram, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
  Presenting Author