The Effectiveness of an Intervention to Promote Awareness and Reduce Online Risk Behavior in Early Adolescence

Journal of Youth and Adolescence, Dec 2015

The current study explored the effect of a school-based intervention on online risk awareness and behavior in order to shed light on a relatively unexplored field with high practical relevance. More than 800 Belgium primary school children (grade 4 and 6) were assessed at two measurements (n T1 = 812, 51.2 % female; n T2 = 819, 51.3 % female) before and after the intervention. Half of them received a 10 min classroom intervention indicating online risks. Children in the control group received a 10 min presentation concerning online applications without any emphasis on risks. Children in the intervention group were more likely to be aware of online risks directly after the intervention; this effect was still noticeable 4 months after. Reporting of online risk behavior in the intervention group was also higher compared to the control group who did not receive the intervention. Overall online risk awareness and online risk behavior were negatively associated and the awareness did not modulate the association between the intervention and online risk behavior. Furthermore, individual differences were assessed. Girls were more likely to be aware of online risks and asserted less online risk behavior than boys were. In line with the imperative in adolescence to become more risk taking, children in a higher grade were more likely to behave in a risky manner when online. The current study provides a valuable starting point for further research on how to decrease online risk behavior in early adolescence.

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The Effectiveness of an Intervention to Promote Awareness and Reduce Online Risk Behavior in Early Adolescence

J Youth Adolescence The Effectiveness of an Intervention to Promote Awareness and Reduce Online Risk Behavior in Early Adolescence Janneke D. Schilder 0 1 2 3 Marjolein B. J. Brusselaers 0 1 2 3 Stefan Bogaerts 0 1 2 3 0 Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, Catholic University of Leuven , Leuven , Belgium 1 Department of Developmental Psychology, School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Tilburg University , 5000 LE Tilburg , The Netherlands 2 & Janneke D. Schilder 3 Belgian Cybercrime Centre of Excellence for Training, Research and Education , Leuven , Belgium The current study explored the effect of a school-based intervention on online risk awareness and behavior in order to shed light on a relatively unexplored field with high practical relevance. More than 800 Belgium primary school children (grade 4 and 6) were assessed at two measurements (n T1 = 812, 51.2 % female; n T2 = 819, 51.3 % female) before and after the intervention. Half of them received a 10 min classroom intervention indicating online risks. Children in the control group received a 10 min presentation concerning online applications without any emphasis on risks. Children in the intervention group were more likely to be aware of online risks directly after the intervention; this effect was still noticeable 4 months after. Reporting of online risk behavior in the intervention group was also higher compared to the control group who did not receive the intervention. Overall online risk awareness and online risk behavior were negatively associated and the awareness did not modulate the association between the intervention and online risk behavior. Furthermore, individual differences were assessed. Girls were more likely to be aware of online risks and asserted less online risk behavior than boys were. In line with the imperative in adolescence to become more risk taking, children in a higher grade were more likely to School-based intervention risk awareness; Online risk behavior; Internet; Online; Early adolescence - behave in a risky manner when online. The current study provides a valuable starting point for further research on how to decrease online risk behavior in early adolescence. Introduction The current generation is the first that takes the existence of the Internet for granted. The EU Kids Online Survey (Livingstone and Haddon 2009) reports that children of 9–16 years old go online for on average 88 min per day. However, rather positive labels to this generation like ‘‘whiz kids’’ disguise the potential negative site of this increase in Internet use. All day access to the Internet via a computer, smartphone or tablet might expose these children to several dangers. Reports, such as the EU kids online report, also emphasize the risky side of their Internet behavior (Livingstone and Haddon 2009) . However, merely knowing the risks does not change the fact that caregivers feel empty handed when dealing with new technologies that did not exist when they were young themselves (Livingstone 2009) . The current study will therefore examine the online risk behavior and online risk awareness in early adolescents and examine whether an awareness raising intervention can be used to change this to the better. De Moor et al. (2008) provide a classification of three different categories of risks that children can encounter when they are on the Internet. The first category is content risk. This category includes different kind of risks concerning possible harmful contents, for example websites showing naked or porn images. More than half of the teenagers accidently saw porn websites when surfing on the Internet (De Moor et al. 2008) . Although not all children experienced negative effects when they face sexual pictures on the Internet, one quarter of the children were extremely upset (Mitchell et al. 2014) . Other examples of risks in the content category are violence or racism websites, but they also refer to a lack of critical skills of children to judge the reliability of information that they see on the Internet (De Moor et al. 2008; for an overview of negative effects also see Valcke et al. 2011) . The second category named by De Moor et al. (2008) is contact risk. Risks in this category all refer to activities on the Internet toward known or unknown persons. Examples include the disclosure of personal information such as the home address or phone number, cyber bullying, and chatting in risky settings. An example of the latter is that 16.1 % of the children indicated that they were asked to give sexual information about themselves, and 10.6 % even received a question to perform a sexual action for another person (De Moor et al. 2008) . The third category is commercial risk. This category refers to the acts of commercial organizations that focus on the exploitation of Internet users (De Moor et al. 2008) . Examples are the abuse of personal information and spam. A mere part of the literature concerning online r (...truncated)


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Janneke D. Schilder, Marjolein B. J. Brusselaers, Stefan Bogaerts. The Effectiveness of an Intervention to Promote Awareness and Reduce Online Risk Behavior in Early Adolescence, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 2015, pp. 286-300, Volume 45, Issue 2, DOI: 10.1007/s10964-015-0401-2