Grand Challenges of Researching Adolescent Online Safety: A Family Systems Approach

Protecting adolescents from online safety risks is a major contemporary concern, and researching adolescent online safety is equally as challenging. Relatively few researchers have studied adolescent online safety, but the studies that do exist have documented threats from privacy breaches, cyberbullying, sexual predation, and other types of risk exposure. The grand challenge, however, is how we can approach these problems in a way that will protect adolescents while allowing them to engage socially online. We discuss two key challenges: operationalizing online safety; and defining online risks. We propose that Information Systems (IS) researchers should leverage family systems theory, a methodological approach grounded in developmental psychology, in order to address adolescent online safety issues.