Global Kids Online: Researching children’s rights globally in the digital age

Abstract

Drawing on an ongoing international research project, Global Kids Online, this article examines the theoretical and methodological challenges of conducting global research on children’s rights in the digital age at a time of intense socio-technological change and contested policy development. Arguing in favour of critically rethinking existing research frameworks and measures for new circumstances, we report on the experience of designing a research toolkit and piloting this in four countries on four continents. We aim to generate national and cross-national insights that can benefit future researchers and research users concerned to build a robust evidence base to understand children’s rights in the digital age. It is hoped that such experiences will prompt wider lessons for the unfolding research and policy agenda.

Introduction

Many children now use the Internet and mobile technologies as part of their everyday lives, as a way of experiencing and acting in the world. Already in high- and middle-income countries, and increasingly in low-income countries, many children’s activities are underpinned by online and mobile networks to the point where drawing the line between offline and online is becoming close to impossible. With this interconnectedness of online and offline experiences comes a range of digitally mediated opportunities and risks (Helsper et al., 2013), some newly emergent in the digital age, but most shaped by children’s pre-existing capabilities, needs and vulnerabilities (Raftree and Bachan, 2011; Barbovschi et al., 2013; Samuels et al., 2013).

To understand these changes, researchers are examining the present manifestations and future potential of digital media uses, policies and infrastructures across diverse domestic, cultural and geographic contexts. Such research, already voluminous, demonstrates the relevance of the Internet to children’s opportunities and risks globally (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2011b, 2012; United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 2012) and raises questions about the implications for children’s rights to provision, protection and participation, as set out a quarter of a century ago in the near-universally ratified United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC; UN, 1989). This in turn is stimulating attention to child rights in Internet governance bodies, such as the Internet Governance Forum and the World Summit on the Information Society, as well as attention to ‘the digital’ in organisations concerned with child rights, like United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), UNICEF, ECPAT International and Council of Europe (Livingstone et al., 2015a). To understand, guide and critique policy and practice nationally and internationally, the intersection of digital technologies and child rights in everyday contexts is also the focus of emerging academic expertise, as exemplified by the articles in this volume (see also Cortesi and Gasser, 2015; Kleine et al., 2014; Livingstone and Bulger, 2014; Third et al., 2014).

However, the evidence on how use of the Internet impacts child rights and well-being is still scattered and patchy in most countries, with some unsatisfactory measures, fast-outdated findings and uncertainties regarding reliability, validity and generalisability. It remains common for research and policy to adopt an explicitly or implicitly technologically determinist vision of the Internet and mobile technologies, sometimes framed by media panics or political agendas, often focusing narrowly on the causal impact of technology on a particular dimension of children’s lives. This neglects the wider structures and contexts that shape children’s everyday lives, including the meanings and practices that children and those around them come to associate with digital technologies (Mansell, 2012; Manyozo, 2011). Another key challenge is that many theories and methods have been developed in the global North, while already the majority of young Internet users, and most future growth in their numbers, is in the global South (The World Bank, 2016).

While not all research on the nature and consequences of children’s use of digital technologies need to necessarily be framed in terms of rights, and much of it is not, we agree with the editors of this special issue that there is considerable merit in adopting a child rights framework, for at least two reasons (Livingstone, 2016). The first is that a rights framework is holistic, concerned with the full range of children’s rights and, thereby, bringing into view the relation – and potential conflict – between protection and participation rights. The second is that a rights framework provides a normative lens through which to critically examine and evaluate the benefits or harms of children’s growing access to and provision of digital technologies, thereby going beyond descriptive accounts to identify where and how policy and practice need to change so as to support children’s rights more effectively. Hence, a rights framework can redress the one-dimensional approach of some research and policy and the tendency to identify, say, how digital technologies could aid education without considering the implications for e-safety, while other research and policy might focus on protection challenges without recognising how the resulting policy can curtail children’s freedoms to participate online.

Finally, it remains important to conduct comparative research that is holistic, rigorous and sensitive to the voices and experiences of children and those who have the power to affect their lifeworlds. Building on and intending to complement other multinational and multi-method research efforts currently underway, the Global Kids Online (GKO) project was initiated with these concerns in mind and with the ambition of supporting bottom-up research that can guide future policy and practice. This article offers a reflexive account of how the research team and its partners have developed the GKO research methodology. It outlines the theoretical framing and methodological choices of the project and explains how these are incorporated into the GKO research process and toolkit.

Researching children’s rights in the digital age: The approach of GKO

GKO was created as an international research partnership, which aims to contribute to gathering rigorous, cross-national evidence on children’s use of the Internet, online risks, opportunities and rights. The project is largely funded by WeProtect Global Alliance and UNICEF (2015–2016) and jointly coordinated by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), the UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti and EU Kids Online. The objective of the first phase was to develop and pilot a flexible, yet standardised, research toolkit that could be adapted and used by researchers to conduct national and cross-national research on children’s use of the Internet, thereby contributing to a comparative evidence base. It included qualitative and quantitative pilot research in four countries – Argentina, ¹ Serbia, ² South Africa ³ and the Philippines ⁴ – in each partnering with national research institutions and UNICEF country offices. The project aims to unite the benefits of central coordination of resources, expertise and tools with a distributed approach to evidence-gathering in the (current and future) partner countries.

In terms of theory, the project takes a broad structuration approach (Giddens, 1984) to children’s lives, recognising the contingent interplay between societal structures of economy, politics, and culture and the meanings and actions of individuals and communities as they engage with and thus shape the structures that, in turn, shape the conditions within which they live. Understanding how this works for children and childhoods across time and place demands continual attention to the dynamics of agency and power within and across contexts (Wells, 2015). To this already complex task, we must add an analysis of digital technology, which we conceptualise as emergent from, rather than external to, the society in which it exerts influence, this influence depending fundamentally on human processes of imagination, design, deployment, use and governance (Lievrouw and Livingstone 2009; Mansell, 2012). Sociocultural and ecological theories of childhood serve to connect structuration approaches with social shaping accounts of technology by emphasising the transactional relationship between individuals and their material-symbolic environment (e.g. Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Wertsch, 1985). Relatedly, the anthropology of consumption has drawn on theories of everyday life to understand how people’s seemingly mundane media practices appropriate initially strange technologies into the familiar domestic and community lifeworlds with often unintended consequences (e.g. Miller et al., 2016). The present challenge is to take a step further and examine how these theories can be used to explain children’s experiences of the digital environment globally and, in particular, whether access to and use of the Internet and mobile technologies make a difference by mediating children’s well-being and, indeed, their rights in positive or negative ways (Livingstone and Bulger, 2014; Swist et al., 2015).

Building on this theory in a European context, the EU Kids Online network of some 150 researchers from multiple disciplines across 33 countries (mostly but not all in Europe) developed and tested a qualitative comparative research methodology and a cross-national survey on children’s online risks and opportunities. ⁵ A fair body of research has resulted from this effort, exploring children’s diverse online activities within particular digital ecologies and showing when and how they result in exposure to various risks and opportunities (Livingstone et al., 2015b). The outcomes of such exposure, in terms of children’s well-being (conceived as the balance of benefits and harms; OECD, 2011a), are found to depend on the encircling social influences on children at meso (family, school, community) and macro (social stratification, governance, cultural infrastructure, etc.) levels (Helsper et al., 2013). This raises the question of whether this approach can and should be applied beyond Europe as the application of research tools from one part of the world to another raises methodological, ethical and political challenges. Yet, researchers based in Europe and the United States have developed a wealth of conceptual and methodological expertise that it would seem wasteful to set aside. Hence, GKO sought an optimal path between building on existing research and expertise while recognising that theory and findings developed in the global North may not be applicable in – and certainly should not be uncritically extended to – the global South.

Two further challenges emerged for GKO during the first year of work. First, the research found itself pulled towards aspirations to global coverage, as more researchers and research users around the world became interested in such comparative work and because the Internet increasingly comprises global companies and governance bodies. Global coverage fits also with our and UNICEF’s commitment to a child rights approach and its abstract, universalist language of identity, dignity, expression, privacy, harm and so forth (see UNICEF Office of Research’s developing agenda on child rights in the digital age). ⁶ Second, and in tension with the first, researching children’s digital experiences around the world requires detailed attention to the highly contingent and contextually specific lifeworlds of children and the communities they live in (Livingstone, 2012). This includes recognising contextually specific meanings of identity, privacy, agency and harm, among other key concepts (notably ‘child’, ‘parent’, ‘education’ and, indeed, ‘Internet’).

To understand those contextual specificities, we early on invited country partners to identify specific issues in terms of children’s lives and rights that are potentially affected by the spread of digital technologies (GKO, 2016). We used the distinctiveness of the specific contexts and the particular issues that arise to help us rethink the research model and tools in a way that addresses better the diversity of children’s lifeworlds. The four countries demonstrated a range of inequalities and vulnerabilities that need to be taken into consideration when researching children’s online risks and opportunities. For example, Argentina, which faces considerable discrepancies in wealth and clear urban/rural divisions, highlighted how such differences might affect children’s possibilities (some would say rights; La Rue, 2014) to Internet access and, therefore, online participation. The work in the Philippines demonstrated the need to consider how in parts of the global South especially, the Internet has transformed the market for child sexual violence comprising grooming, sexual abuse and sexual exploitation (including child pornography), with girls and children facing higher risks (Bose and Coccaro, 2013; Garcia de Diego, 2012). Protection issues are high on the agenda of the Philippines, given use of web streaming to exacerbate already-existing risks (Terre des Hommes, 2013). However, there are also potential advantages to be had – a sizeable proportion of Filipino parents work abroad, prompting some families to use video communication technologies to engage with their children at home (Miller and Madianou, 2012). In Serbia, Roma children face particular difficulties in exercising their rights to education, cultural heritage and play (UNICEF, 2011). For minority groups and smaller language communities, digital technologies offer particular networking benefits and economies of scale that could provide positive opportunities and help overcome social exclusion but could also, without them, leave such groups further behind. Finally, for South African children who suffer the multiple disadvantages often associated with poverty, the threat of violence is now manifest online (Samuels et al., 2013). But since many children live without parents (and especially without digitally knowledgeable parents or schools; Livingstone and Byrne, 2015), online violence – often sexualised – is difficult to address, compounded by low trust in law enforcement institutions.

To address these and other diverse concerns, in deliberation with our international advisors and country partners, it was agreed that the project should examine the multiple and interconnected levels of influence – individual, social and national (or regional) – on children’s Internet use, bearing in mind that developing measures for comparing these across countries is demanding (Richardson and Ali, 2014). The research must recognise the highly diverse contexts of childhood, acknowledging also that even the meanings of gender, age (e.g. the age of majority or of sexual consent) and socio-economic status and forms of inclusion/exclusion vary in different countries.

In co-designing a project with national partners that draws on but does not simply reproduce established expertise, and that remains open and responsive to such new insights and challenges, we framed two overarching, inclusive and interdependent research questions for GKO. First, when and how does Internet use (and associated online, digital and networked technologies) contribute positively to children’s lives – by providing opportunities and contributing to well-being? Second, when and how is Internet use problematic in children’s lives – amplifying the risk of harm that may undermine well-being and development? The breadth of these questions is deliberate, since conceptually and empirically we do not yet know which opportunities or risks are most interesting or pressing in the diverse contexts children are growing up in, and practically the intention is to stimulate and sustain a dialogue among participating researchers rather than predetermine the research agenda and priorities. While in due course we will report on the primary research findings from the partner countries, the present focus is on theoretical framing and methodology. Given a starting point in the European experience, how can researchers globally capture and learn from the diversity and specificity of children’s digital experiences in their local contexts? What can be learned from the conduct of GKO’s first year for the wider effort of researching children’s rights in the digital age?

Making decisions about research design

In designing the GKO research, we faced a number of methodological challenges, including decisions about the balance between standardisation and flexibility, combining multiple methods and the balance between risks and opportunities, which we explore below. Comparative research projects vary in how much leeway they permit the country studies or how much control they exert from the ‘centre’ (Livingstone, 2012). Like many, we selected a flexible and adaptable model in which a designated core is required for all country studies, while optional elements may vary according to country, context and preference. We add to this an emphasis on dynamic collaboration and sustained dialogue, to ensure that both country and comparative projects can learn from each other. Thus, in planning, designing and conducting the research, the GKO Steering Group consulted widely with several groups of interested parties throughout. These included anticipated research users (non-governmental organisations (NGOs), child rights organisations, Internet governance bodies, governments and representatives of the Internet and mobile industries), as well as researchers already conducting related cross-national projects (such as the Health Behaviour in School Children study and research advisors to the OECD, Eurostat and International Telecommunications Union).

The initial feedback from the participating countries was used to adapt and redesign the tools developed by EU Kids Online, which were then piloted and further adapted by each partner country to ensure that they are meaningful to children and contextually relevant while maintaining a degree of standardisation to ensure comparability across national findings. Insights from this developmental work, as well as from cognitive and pilot testing with children, allowed further refinement of the toolkit, thereby incorporating some degree of insight from children and their experiences and perspectives. We employed both face-to-face, online meetings and country visits to sustain a lively dialogue among the project steering group, methodology experts, country partners and the international advisory group, as part of a continuous multi-directional learning process to guide development of the research toolkit.

Launched in autumn 2016, the GKO research toolkit includes a series of expert methodological guides, a modular survey and survey administration guidance, qualitative research protocols and guidance for use, information for potential future members and tools to support comparative analysis and reporting. ⁷ The core, optional and adaptable elements variously operationalise the individual and meso dimensions of the theoretical framework to enable new data collection (while leaving the macro country level to be examined using secondary sources indicators from, for instance, the World Values Study, World Internet Project, International Telecommunications Union and UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS), as well as such standard measures as gross domestic product (GDP) and Gini coefficient; Richardson and Ali, 2014).

Departing from EU Kids Online, we rethought the standardised survey format to permit a balance between standardisation and contextualisation. We identified core questions which are mandatory, to ensure broad coverage of key issues related to children’s online experiences and to enable cross-national comparison of findings. They were carefully selected via ongoing consultation with the research partners and the international advisory board, and based on the qualitative work with children conducted in three of the countries prior to the survey design. We also selected optional questions which emerged from the literature and current developments in policy and practice, and can be included where judged appropriate or interesting, enabling new studies to build on the insights of already-completed research. The adaptable questions recognise where it would be most valuable to ask questions according to the context, whether by adding locally meaningful items or constructing new questions specifically relevant to national or local contexts.

Decisions related to the use and suitability of multiple research methods were also made during the pilot stages of the project. While researchers tend to divide into those who favour qualitative or quantitative approaches, after discussion and pilot testing, we decided on a mixed-methods approach for GKO, with qualitative research judged necessary to reflect the concerns and perspectives of children themselves (Kleine et al., 2014). We envisage that qualitative work is best conducted before the survey, but in cases where considerable qualitative or participatory research has already been conducted in a country, it may be more useful to conduct the qualitative research afterwards, to help interpret puzzles revealed through the survey. While a mixed-methods approach is widely approved in the research community, there is no doubt that this is an expensive decision, particularly when funds are limited. Relatedly, it is worth noting that we found the tension between standardisation and contextualisation more difficult to resolve in relation to survey design. The qualitative research – focus groups and individual interviews – covered core and optional themes while leaving opportunities for both researcher and children to flexibly alter or even diverge from the topic guide. Thus, adaptability emerged naturally in the conduct of the research itself, whereas in survey design it had to be carefully anticipated through prior cognitive testing and piloting with children.

In addition to determining an adaptable and mixed-methods design, another key decision, foregrounded in the EU Kids Online work, was to pursue both research questions in tandem – with each country study examining both the risks and opportunities of children’s Internet use. The reasons for this were partly conceptual – following our theoretical framework, we aim to avoid prejudging what is a risk or an opportunity (as this depends on perspective, context and outcome). In addition, prior empirical research shows that risks and opportunities are positively correlated: since research often focuses on one or the other, the interconnections between them are easily missed (Livingstone et al., 2012). So, too, in relation to policymaking, one often finds ministries of education keen to know about online opportunities and ministries of justice seeking data on online risks. Since, problematically, efforts to promote opportunities can exacerbate risks while efforts to reduce risks can curtail opportunities, it is vital that researchers explore the interdependency of risk and opportunity so that policymakers can make holistic decisions.

This is important for children’s rights since, too often, children’s rights to provision, protection or participation tend to be promoted on parallel tracks, leaving little insight into the occasions when protection and participation rights appear in conflict. These are seemingly common in digital environments, perhaps because regulatory solutions are generally unable to reflect an individual child’s capacity or best interests or perhaps because children have embraced the Internet precisely as a locus for their exploratory, experimental, even transgressive activities. Thus, a fair number of children’s online activities cannot neatly be categorised as risks or opportunities, having more the character of ‘risky opportunities’ (Livingstone et al., 2012). The notion of risky opportunities emerged from research consulting children themselves, for often what may normatively be thought of as a risk may be seen as an opportunity by a child. In Serbia, for instance, illegally downloading copyright content (piracy) seemed to offer opportunities for entertainment and sharing otherwise unavailable to children (GKO, 2016). Relatedly, the notion of ‘meeting strangers’ as a risk seems misconceived in countries where children are already used to building new social relationships online, often unsupervised and valuing such meetings precisely for that reason, given the opportunities for new friendships (although this does not stop parents from worrying about this; GKO, 2016). Similarly, taking and sending sexual images, an act illegal for minors in South Africa and elsewhere, might harm some children under some circumstances but benefit others in terms of the right to sexual identity and expression (Gillespie, 2013). In such instances, policymakers (along with parents and schools) are often tempted to focus on protection, not always noticing the potential cost to children’s provision and participation rights. By acknowledging that risks and opportunities are interrelated, the GKO methodology incorporates the voices of children not only in research (Barbovschi et al., 2013) but also in policy and practice (Bucht and Eström, 2012).

Learning about research priorities in the global South

In the European context, several elements of the toolkit had been taken for granted in ways that had to be substantially rethought as the research embraced more continents, which our partners made clear as the work developed. Perhaps the most demanding was the question of children’s daily circumstances. While it has been widely recognised in the global North that children live in a wide variety of family constellations, it remains commonplace for surveys on children’s Internet use to assume that a child lives in one home, most likely with their own bedroom in which they can go online with reliable connectivity and with two parents ready to discuss their day over the evening meal. While, of course, such assumptions are inappropriate and misleading for many children also in the global North, in designing a global study it was imperative to allow for considerably more diversity when asking questions about whom a child lives with, what socio-economic resources are available at home and when and where they gain Internet access. For instance, the GKO toolkit recognises that a teenage ‘girl’ may live with her boyfriend’s family or that children may live with grandparents or in foster care. Similarly, instead of asking about Internet use in the living room or bedroom, we ask about Internet use in places where the child is in public or where they can be private (Gigli and Marles, 2013). Instead of assuming constant connectivity, we ask about the quality and availability of connectivity in both communal (e.g. community or commercial) and domestic settings, as well as about shared devices.

Following discussions with our partners about children’s lifeworlds in diverse contexts, we broadened the GKO measures to recognise the more diverse positionality and roles children might have in their families and societies, acknowledging for example that some children might work during the day, paid or otherwise, which means that their leisure time can be more scarce, that they may not attend school at all (or not regularly) and that people other than caregivers or teachers might be responsible for their daily supervision (or, indeed, that children may go unsupervised for a large part of the day or be responsible for supervising others). Since research and policy often assume that parents and teachers are the key sources of guidance and supervision, particularly in relation to children’s access to the Internet, the existing models need to be reconsidered.

Proving most difficult, after reviewing many studies’ efforts to measure socio-economic inequality using questions that can be asked directly to children (Richardson and Ali, 2014), we developed a proxy measure of material deprivation potentially adaptable for all countries and based on the European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey. It allows the country partners to choose from a selection of items which ask children about the frequency of holidays, new shoes, how often they have fresh fruit and vegetables to eat and so on, or to propose new, contextually meaningful items that could, in combination, discriminate among children’s living conditions in such a way that could, at the aggregate cross-national level, generate a reliable classification into high, medium and low status. However, pilot testing in three of our four countries (in Argentina, socio-economic status was assessed by a compound variable using data from the parent questionnaire only) revealed this to be a poor measure in practice. The challenge remains to find ways to assess socio-economic status across highly diverse and unequal societies when researchers have access to children but not parents.

The conditions of children’s lives are likely to have implications for the risks and opportunities that the Internet and mobile technologies afford them, thereby reconfiguring whether and how their rights are met. In practice, opportunities proved easier to ask about than risks. Across many contexts, it is hoped that the Internet and mobile technologies will offer children opportunities to communicate, learn and gain digital skills, so asking about these is uncontroversial, although it needs more work to imagine what the genuine benefits could be beyond the mantra of more information (what kind, what quality, how diverse?). Children’s use of the Internet for participation is more controversial beyond child rights circles although questions persist even there (participation in what, with what consequence?). By working with partners from the global South, we extended the opportunities asked about in countries, including access to community resources, health information, civic engagement and brokering Internet access for adult relatives. Mapping the range of relevant risks was more contentious – with ethical concern strong in the Philippines (given a strong Catholic culture) and questions of priorities notable in South Africa (where concern focused more on the risk of insufficient Internet access than on the risks associated with access). Nonetheless, a considerable challenge remains in identifying the range of opportunities and risks that could and should be asked about to advance children’s rights in the digital age. The sociocultural approaches to everyday life discussed at the outset of this article have recently embraced an analysis of capabilities, conceiving, for instance, of children’s lifeworlds and well-being in terms of a collective sense of what can benefit communities in their own terms, eschewing external judgements of what may or may not ‘be good for them’ and demanding a more participatory and child-led approach (Swist et al., 2015).

Conclusion

Developments in Internet governance as this relates to children’s rights tend to be mainly protectionist, led more by anxious media headlines about online risks than by children’s enthusiasm for online opportunities. These tend to compartmentalise policies for protection and provision or participation rather than recognise their interdependence and too often developing policy and practice in advance of the insights to be gained from constructing a robust cross-national evidence base (Livingstone et al., 2015b). To redress this situation, we have proposed a framework and methodology for researching children’s digital rights globally. In so doing, we have faced a key tension between two positions: first, there are good grounds to rethink existing knowledge as the geographic scope of the research widens to encompass the diversity of children’s online experiences and life contexts globally; second, there are also good grounds to build on hard-won expertise when researching in countries newer to the potential of Internet use for children’s rights. Our resolution has been to document the principles and processes that underpinned our partnership approach, combining both standardised and contextual dimensions in the GKO research toolkit.

Continued research efforts should be directed towards understanding the factors relating to individual children, how their online experiences and social support structures make a difference to the outcomes in terms of well-being and rights, and recognising that children may perceive the outcomes differently from what might be expected, that influential factors usually act in combination and that diversity in children’s circumstances will make for complex and contingent findings. One year’s work for GKO could achieve some results, but much more remains to be done, including involving children more thoroughly in the design, interpretation and use of findings; extending the optional and adaptable elements of the toolkit to capture the breadth of children’s online experiences; depicting more dimensions of child rights in the digital environment; and finding ways to keep up with the continual changes in the digital environment.