Parental Perceptions of Risk in the Digital Environment

The Digital Ecology of Fear project investigates how parents have adapted to the rapidly changing digital environment. This research focuses on parents of children in middle childhood (ages 6-12) and among other methods, utilized two surveys (n = 199) in order to study this. Specifically, I looked into a question on the survey that asked about the risks that parents believed to pose the most of a threat to their children and in which platforms these were most prevalent. I constructed a two-mode network to analyze the relationship between the total number of risks nominated within each platform to each other. Platforms such as: social media, audio/visual streaming, messaging/texting, and video games were found to have similar risks associated with them. Mental well-being has the most ties to platforms, while harm to future opportunity and physical safety have the least. The risks with less association to other risks tend to be more abstract, therefore parents tend to identify tangible risks. These results help to build a cultural model of how parents are viewing risks in the digital environment. Additional contextual information about the respondents’ demographic characteristics and the devices available to their children are also described.