Children’s Perspectives of Navigating Online Opportunities and Risks: Engaging Child Stakeholders Through Multimodal Play-Based Methods

This paper outlines qualitative research in which children aged 3 to 13 years were positioned as stakeholders in their digital citizenship skills development. Children were given the opportunity to share their lived experiences of the digital world, including online risks, with researchers and each other in play-based research roundtables. This approach reflects the researchers’ commitment to child-centred investigations that employ play-based data capture methods (for example, Literat, 2013 ) appropriate for children’s individual cultural, developmental and literacy contexts. Researchers centred a holistic notion of digital citizenship ( DQ Institute, 2019 , 2023 ) as an alternative to purely-protectionist approaches, gathering children’s perspectives of digital opportunities for connection, identity, creativity and play, all important counterpoints to risk. Project outcomes shared in this paper highlight how children’s perspectives can be garnered in order to shape and influence policies and practices that impact children’s digital lives.