HCC: Small: Prompting Intentional Social Media Use Among Children and Parents

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This research will develop new ways to (1) prompt intentional behavior and reflection among children when they become new social media users; (2) support parents in taking a proactive, rather than reactive, role in guiding their children's social media use; and (3) develop theoretical insights about prompting self-awareness among users with and through social systems. Parents are concerned about the content, context, and frequency of their children?s social media use and struggle to cope with these facets. Unfortunately, many parenting approaches to date are reactive and are focused on tracking, logging, or cutting off access to social media. Furthermore, the lack of empirical research in this area has left parents ill-equipped to try alternate strategies. Trying to cut off access to social media could lead to psychological reactance, where children engage in risky behaviors secretly instead of communicating openly with their parents. If we expect parents to raise their children effectively in a complex and rapidly changing digital world, we must develop new tools, approaches, and theories to help them do so. To address this gap, this research casts a new perspective on social media design that focuses on the study and development of social systems that prompt proactive and reflective behavior based on context-dependent cues. The research will use a mixed-methods approach with four phases: (1) conduct parent-child interviews to understand why parents worry about social media and how their worries relate to children?s behaviors; (2) conduct a mobile phone experiment to prompt intentionality and reflection with mobile phone use among children and parents; (3) conduct a web-based experiment to prompt intentionality and reflection with laptop use among children and parents; and (4) synthesize results and develop new theories about ways of prompting reflection and self-awareness in social media systems. Mobile phones and laptops were chosen because they are widely adopted among youth and they are personal and portable, which introduces new parenting challenges. Effectiveness will be evaluated by comparing experimental and control group outcomes using a variety of measures including mobile phone logs, browser logs, self-reports, and validated behavioral scales.Understanding how to prompt regular, real-time reflection with and through social media can guide the design of new kinds of social systems that prompt increased self-awareness and competency. The project will disseminate mobile phone and web-based tools to local parents, schools, and community organizations and will make them publicly available online. It will also disseminate research outcomes for a non-technical audience in the form of presentations, media outputs, and short reports. This research can have a vital and potentially transformative impact on early social media use among children and their parents, addressing a challenge that almost every parent in the U.S. now faces.