How eNurture supported the Digital Ethics of Care project with pre-teens: Dr Michelle O'Reilly

In the 3rd of a series of blog posts by eNurture grant holders, Dr Michelle O’Reilly (University of Leicester) outlines the exciting progress made so far on her project ‘Empowering pre-teens online through a digital ethics of care framework’.

Background

Our previous work with adolescents (supported by the Wellcome Trust) led to a ‘digital ethics of care’ framework (O’Reilly et al., 2020). Ethics of care focuses on the idea that we can only be responsible in our behaviour because of the human capacity of empathy (Tronto, 2005). We proposed that a digital ethics of care, then, would:

Emphasise agency and autonomy online
Enable individuals to recognise their responsibility for their own content (e.g. on social media)
Promote empathy and care for others in digital spaces
Integrate ethics of care, virtue ethics, and children’s rights.

The digital ethics of care idea resonated strongly with our adolescent advisory board, who agreed that the idea could usefully be adapted and applied to pre-teens. This then led to our successful application for eNurture funding.

Our eNurture funded project explored whether this interdisciplinary, flexible framework of online moral conduct could be applied for 10-11-year-olds. This is particularly important given evidence showing that there is a disconnect between moral reasoning and behaviour behind a screen (Flores & James, 2013).

We suggested that a greater focus on empathy could be a useful addition to educationalists teaching primary school children about wellbeing and digital technology.

In mapping out this potential usefulness our project had three objectives, to:

Explore the relevance of a digital ethics of care for 10-11-year-olds.
Scope the benefits and challenges of a co-production methodological approach whereby children become active researchers in the process of data collection.
Co-produce story-based moral scenarios with children and associated lesson plans with teachers for use within the school classroom.

To achieve our aims and objectives we designed a qualitative project that actively involved children as co-researchers, engaged a child advisory board in decision-making, and included an expert stakeholder group for advice.

Progress

There is no doubt that trying to do research in child mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenge; we have had to be flexible as schools have locked down, and teachers had other priorities. However, with the support of our involved primary schools, and the insights from our child advisory board and expert stakeholder group, we have been able to make some encouraging progress.

We have recruited 18 children to the study, clustered into nine pairs from schools in Northamptonshire. Working closely with our teacher, teaching assistant (TA), and head teacher partners we co-created a lesson plan to teach and build children’s interviewing skills which was delivered as part of standard teaching.

A whole class of children were taught how to interview, and 18 consenting children then participated in the study.

Due to the restrictions imposed by COVID-19, we adapted our data collection process, and the researcher attended the interviews over Teams, the children were paired in a classroom, and a TA sat in the background for support and safeguarding. We therefore added an additional objective of the study, to:

Test the feasibility of adapting co-production methods in online spaces.

The pairs of children then interviewed each other as part of the data collection process. They interviewed each other in three domains of questions, adding in their own questions, using active listening and engaged further with some prompting from the researcher:

Children’s moral reasoning process in on-and-offline contexts.
Children’s beliefs regarding personal responsibility to others online.
Children’s understanding of how online conduct might impact their mental wellbeing and that of others.

Preliminary findings

We are currently in the process of engaging with the data generated from the project. The children had so much to say during their interviewing each other that we have a lot of work to do to analyse these data. We have produced our initial coding framework, but there is more work for us to do before we are able to disseminate the project formally. Early key messages from the children are:

Recognition that they are exposed to a lot of unkind behaviour online, it is frequent and endemic.
The unkind behaviour causes negative emotions – sadness, fear, stress.
Some social media platforms provide a mechanism for greater levels unkindness (e.g., Instagram, snapchat, Roblox).
They need support to encourage more empathic behaviour.

The children talked about the importance of online safety and gave examples of how they could be taught what was good and bad behaviour online. They talked about possible scenarios that they could critically discuss to understand the feelings of others, and they talked about the need for adult guidance.

“Going over, like, safety online and doing maybe like text messages and say what’s wrong and what’s good about this.”

“Create a scenario with, um, so the person that’s being mean and the person that has received the comment and everything but swap it round, see what…how the person that’s being mean, see how—understand, so they can understand how the other person felt.”

“You could tell them about your experiences online and what you did and then maybe what you thought you should have done, and what you think would be right to do.”

Outcomes and next steps

While we are at a point in the project where we are immersing ourselves in data and, together with our artist partner Tom Cleaver we are also creating storyboards depicting online moral scenarios, with associated lesson plans, as a foundation for teachers to discuss the role of empathy online.

These will provide a range of supportive options for characters as third parties to help children relate to their own lives in a digital world.

The storyboard scenarios will form part of a toolkit for teachers to use in the classroom to teach empathy, encourage critical thinking skills about online behaviour and responsibility, and to connect the online world to the feelings and experiences of others.

Our team has had several discussion meetings about the toolkit, and the storyboard scenarios. We are also reaching out to our teacher, headteacher and teaching assistant partners, our expert stakeholders, and our child advisory board for views on the current storyboard scenarios. As part of our toolkit discussions, we are also exploring other aspects that could be included – as depicted in the images below.

Our longer-term plan is to utilise this project findings and outcomes to help develop a larger scale funding bid. We will also publish papers to showcase the voices of these children and to promote the importance of empathy in online spaces. We will be launching our toolkit when completed with the support of the local MP.

Dr Michelle O’Reilly, Associate Professor of Communication in Mental Health and Chartered Psychologist in Health at the University of Leicester, and Research Consultant at Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust, specialises in qualitative child mental health research. Michelle was a recipient of an e-Nurture grant in the second round of funding in 2021 for the project ‘Empowering pre-teens online through a digital ethics of care framework’, with Co-Investigators Diane Levine and Sarah Adams. In this blog post, Michelle outlines what the team has achieved with this support.

References

Flores, A., and James, C. (2013). Morality and ethics behind the screen: young people’s perspectives on digital life. New Media and Society, 15(6), 834-852

O’Reilly, M., Levine, D., and Law, E. (2021). Digital Ethics of Care philosophy to understand adolescents' sense of responsibility on social media. Pastoral Care in Education, 39(2), 91-107

Tronto, J. (2005). An ethic of care, in Cudd, A., & Andreasen, R., (Eds.), Feminist theory: a philosophical anthology, (pp. 251–263). Oxford, UK Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing.

Click here to watch Michelle’s presentation at our Research Showcase event on 17 January