How eNurture funding has helped to develop my research: Dr Simon Hammond

In the 2nd of a series of blog posts by eNurture grant holders, Dr Simon Hammond (University of East Anglia) outlines what his team has been able to achieve with the funding from eNurture. His project ‘Exploring understandings of digital resilience to inform the development of a Digital Resilience Scale (DRS) for ‘pre-teens’ (9-12 year olds)’ was awarded a grant in our 1st funding call in 2019 and was successfully completed in October 2020 despite COVID restrictions.

Well, this is not how I imagined delivering my first study as a Principal Investigator (PI). I remember reading and re-reading the congratulation email to three times and then going outside my office into the corridor searching for someone to high-five. Of course, these are the days prior to relying on children’s books to prop up monitors and when you didn’t need a risk assessment to high-five someone.

After six years of delivering other people’s research studies and having gained my first full-time permanent contract in March 2019, I was finally able to ask the research questions I wanted to ask arising from during my PhD.

In exploring the role of digital technologies to assist young people with care experience to reflect on their life events, the need to pursue opportunities to embrace digital resilience emerged (Hammond and Cooper, 2015). However, whilst the term digital resilience began to gain traction, in practice and policy, important knowledge gaps remained.

The need to understand which media literacy education resources work (or don’t work), for whom, how and what circumstances was pressing prior to producing interventions and evaluations. As too is the relationship between digital resilience, risk and mental health. However, without important conceptual work and valid and reliable way to measure digital resilience, claims around ‘improving digital resilience’ or its protective role in buffering the impact of online risk experiences remain optimistic at best.

The eNurture funding has allowed our team to undertake a meta-ethnography illustrating the need to understand digital resilience as a situated and complex process, involving the children but also the resilience capacity of their contexts (i.e. family/home environments, communities and societies).

Our qualitative work with children, parent/carers, and media literacy experts (n=79) offered a broader conceptualisation of digital resilience and illustrated the need for robust ways to measure digital resilience across different domains (i.e. learning, recognising, managing and recovering) and at differing levels of resilience (i.e. individual, family/close friends or home environments, communities and societies). This work has also generated an initial pool of items ready for use in the scale development process. Finally, our two systematic reviews assessing the utility of available resilience scales, and measures of digital-related constructs (e.g., digital literacy), designed for use with children concluded that a valid and reliable measure of digital resilience is absent in the literature.

Whilst the pandemic has slowed down the writing and publication process of these works, the pandemic has also amplified their importance, with the eNurture network also enabling to link with likeminded other within and outside of academia.

Based on this funding, the ideas, confidence and experiences gained from it I have secured funding from:

National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Research for Patient Benefit Programme (£141,125); “Improving the mental health and mental health support available to adolescents looked-after via low-intensity life story work: A realist review ” - PI
Internet Matters and Huawei (£30,000) for Exploring how the online lives of vulnerable young people are supported by professionals: The views of professionals, parents and young people (The EVEN Study). Report entitled ‘Changing conversations: Empowering vulnerable children in a connected world’ due for release March 2022 – PI
Nominet, Public Benefit Programme; “Fostering Digital Skills for Life” (£140,000) in collaboration with The Fostering Network and Internet Matters – Co-applicant
University of East Anglia Health and Social Care Partnership to set up and lead LANTERN Looked After Children's Mental Health Research Network

Based on this work I have also contributed to:

the creation of the Inclusive Digital Safety Hub;
the creation of the Digital Passport, led by Adrienne Katz, a practice guide for having conversations with children and young people with care experience;

Based on my eNurture this work I have become a member of the following groups:

UK Council for Internet Safety (UKCIS) Digital Resilience Working Group (DRWG);
UK Council for Internet Safety (UKCIS) Vulnerable Users Working Group (VUWG);
Internet Matters Expert Advisory Panel.

The funding really has given me the confidence and platform to drive my research agenda. I look forward to continuing to work with those within the eNurture network as I look to commence the next phases of this programme of work.

Thank you eNurture team 😊

Dr Simon Hammond
University of East Anglia

Click here to watch Simon’s presentation at our Research Showcase Event on 17 January