Browsing by Author "Vähänen, Henna"

The objective of this research was to determine what sorts of risks pre-adolescent children are able to recognize on social media and how they act once they have acknowledged these dangers. Additionally, the goal was to study the effects of school and media education on the preadolescents’ social media behavior. In this research social media has mostly been de-fined according to previous studies, as applications favored by children and adolescents. One class of fifth graders from the Helsinki metropolitan area participated in the research. The material was collected through themed small-group interviews. There were a total of 21 participants and seven interview groups. The data was categorized and analyzed by using the content analysis method. Four different content types were identified from the material, and were categorized as social media risks recognized by the pre-adolescents. These labelled risks were bullying, personal information, hoaxes and unpleasant content. Bullying on social media was brought up the most often. The adolescents had been taught media education at school, but they still would have preferred to receive further education especially on the subject of social media har-assment. Some of them felt they were already familiar with the content of the media educa-tion curriculum beforehand, and had not learned any new useful information. The pre-adolescents’ behavior on social media aligned with the risks they had identified and the media education they had received. They valued their own privacy on social media, but were not able to react to bullying otherwise than by blocking the harassers. The pre-adolescents con-sidered bullying to be a substantial part of social media, without any possible solutions.