School of Arts and Humanities

Lelia Green has been researching young peoples’ lives online since 2002 and has significant experience in working with adolescents. Green is a co-editor of a recent book on young people and cyberbullying Narratives in Research and Interventions on Cyberbullying among Young People (Springer, 2019). She has also recently completed Digitising Early Childhood (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), and is currently engaged in the Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children (Routledge, forthcoming). She is the author of Communication, Technology and Society (Sage, 2001); The Internet: An Introduction to New Media (Berg, 2010); and co-editor of Narratives in Research and Interventions on Cyberbullying Among Young People (Springer, 2019); Digitising Early Childhood (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2019); Framing Technology: Society, Choice and Change (Allen + Unwin, 1994) and The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children (Forthcoming 2020).

Lelia has been a chief investigator on 6 Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grants and 7 ARC Linkage Projects.  She is Professor of Communications in the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia.

View Lelia's full research profile.

Debra Dudek is an Associate Professor in the English Program at Edith Cowan University. Her research focuses on visual and verbal texts for young people, including picture books, graphic novels, television, film, and novels. She is particularly interested in how texts for young people engage with social justice issues, and a focus on ethics informs her research more generally. Debra is on the Executive Board of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature and on the Editorial Board of Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature. Dudek’s book contributions include Keywords for Children's Literature (NYU Press, 2021), Seriality and Young People’s Texts (Palgrave 2014), and Affect, Emotion, and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (Routledge, 2017). She is the author of monograph The Beloved Does Not Bite: Moral Vampires and the Humans Who Love Them (Routledge, 2017). Chief Investigator Debra Dudek has expertise in teens’ engagement with and constructions of narrative.

View Debra's full research profile.

Kelly Jaunzems is a research assistant and PhD candidate in Edith Cowan’s School of Arts and Humanities. Kelly has worked with Professor Lelia Green on two prior Australian Research Council (ARC) Grants.  Following an extensive career in hospitality and food and beverage management, in Britain and Australia, Kelly confirmed her desire to engage in in-depth research via a Masters of Occupational Health and Safety. This two years of intensive study, drew her attention to the fact that OHS communication practices have generally advanced little over the past quarter century.  Her PhD research explores the reasons why this might be and constructs a framework through which conservative practitioners within the OHS profession might feel empowered to use social media.

Carmen Jacques is a Research Assistant in Edith Cowan’s School of Arts and Humanities.  Carmen recently completed her PhD focussed on the ongoing lives of survivors of terrorism. She has previously worked as a Research Assistant on several ARC grants with Anne Aly and Lelia Green. Carmen has published her paper, Trauma seeks trauma: One journalist’s experience of terror echoes back to WWII, and more recently she has written for The Conversation and been interviewed by The Briefing on the need for a Peace Park at the site of the 2002 Bali Bombing. Currently, Carmen is working on the everyday impacts of media use in households and their children (age 1-17).

Giselle Woodley is a PhD Candidate and researcher under the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University. Giselle possesses a background in Sexology, Arts and Media. Giselle currently teaches with the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry and the School of Design and Built Environment at Curtin University. She has experience with teaching engaging and working with young adults both locally and abroad. She is particularly interested in reducing sexual violence and promoting relationships and sexual education (RSE), especially in terms of building respect, empathy and healthy relationships.

Your participation involves you agreeing to an interview, and you agreeing to your child being interviewed, if your child decides they wish take part. Each interview will take about 30 minutes to an hour, and both interviews will take place at the same time with different interviewers. You and your child will be asked about their, and their friends’, experiences of accessing challenging content online; what they see as the possible harms experienced from such access, and any strategies you have for keeping young people safe in digital contexts. There is no assumption that your teen has encountered sexual content online, but there is an assumption that they know it exists, and may know peers who have encountered it. If there is time, you may also share your views about policy settings in this area and your opinions on the usefulness or otherwise of sex education programs in school, etc.

Interviews will be recorded and transcribed, and data will be de-identified so that neither individual participants nor families can be identified. An honorarium of a $30 Coles-Myer voucher will be paid to you and your child as a thank you to them for taking part.

Focus Groups

Your child’s participation in this research project will involve them being part of a focus group discussion with other teens. Over about 80-90 minutes, plus about 10-15 mins paperwork, teens will discuss their experiences of access to challenging content online, and any concerns they or other teens may have. They may discuss their views of the policy settings; the helpfulness of sex education in schools; and any strategies they feel may be helpful, along with things they may wish had been done differently, by them or by others.

The focus group will be recorded and transcribed, and data will be de-identified so that individual participants cannot be identified from the records. An honorarium of a $30 Coles-Myer voucher will be paid to teen participants as our ‘thank you’ for taking part.

No. You and your child’s participation in this research project are completely voluntary.  If you do not wish you or your child to take part, that’s totally fine. If you decide you and your child can take part and later change your mind, you are free to withdraw both of you from the project at any time. Any data contributed by you and your child can be withdrawn up to a month after the interviews take place. Your child also has the same rights to participate or not, and to withdraw or not, and to withdraw data, as you do, with respect to their own data.

If you decide you and your child will take part, and your child chooses to do so, your child will also be given a Participant Information Letter like this one, and both of you will have a Consent form to sign. You will each have a copy of your Information letter to keep. Any decision not to let your child take part, or to allow your child to take part and later withdraw consent, will not affect your relationship with the research team and or with Edith Cowan University and or with the Australian Research Council.

If you are interested in the project after you’ve read the information letter, and if your teen is also interested in taking part and you’re happy for them to do so, we can set up an interview.  The interview will probably be between 30 minutes and one hour long. Separate interviewers will interview you and your teen. You will each be interviewed privately, but at the same time via a digital audio or video platform such as Skype or Zoom. We can sort out a time for the interviews that suits you including after school, in the evening or at weekends.

We will report our research outcomes to the Australian Research Council on or around January 2024. We will send this report to you and or your child if you wish. We intend to publish our research in journals, and to present it at research conferences locally, nationally and internationally. We will be engaging in policy debates. No identifying information about you or your child will be included in any of the publications or presentations.

This research project has received the approval of Edith Cowan University’s Human Research Ethics Committee, in accordance with the National Health and Medical Research Council’s National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (2007).  The approval number is 2019-00583-GREEN.

The focus group itself will last for 80-90 minutes. Paperwork before and after may take a further 10-15 minutes. Refreshments will be served and a token honorarium will be paid to child participants.

There will be four focus groups. The focus group your child may contribute to depends upon your child’s age, their gender identification, and their availability.

The purpose of these focus groups is to investigate:

• Young people’s perceptions of the risk and harm they experience in online contexts, including bullying, identity theft and access to sexual content.
• Teens’ knowledge about sexual content on the internet. While there is no suggestion that your child, or any other participant, has actually accessed sexual content online, it is assumed they know there is content online that is restricted to adults.
• How different age groups and gender-identifications of children at secondary school understand sexual content, where they encounter it online and offline, and how teens understand rules around young people not having access to adult content.
• Whether teens have accessed sexual content online, or have known other young people who have accessed sexual content online, and whether those young people have felt harmed in some way, or not. ‘Harm’ may include feeling bothered, unsettled or wishing they hadn’t seen something.
• Whether teens feel that formal sex education delivered as part of their school curriculum prepares them for dealing with the wider world.
• Teens’ perceptions of adults’ strategies for restricting access to prohibited content, and whether they would try something different, or do the same things, if they themselves were acting in their parents’, or teachers’ roles.
• Young male teens’, and slightly older female teens’ perceptions of why some teens access adult content and other teens don’t, and the reasons that teens might give for choosing to access, or not to access, adult content.
• Whether and how access to adult content impacts upon young people’s perceptions of romantic relationships.
• [For the older teen group only: 15-17] Whether young people feel pressured into doing things they might otherwise not choose to do because of their, or their romantic partner’s, perceptions of adult content online.