Co-Designing and Evaluating Adolescent Online Safety Nudges with Teens

Abstract

There is growing concern regarding adolescent online risks posed by social media and emerging technologies. Prior work calls for a paradigm shift from restrictive approaches towards strength-based solutions that can empower teens to self-regulate their experiences. “Nudges” are one such promising solution that can provide intelligent assistance to teens without restricting their autonomy. Yet, there is limited understanding on how to design and evaluate effective resilience-based nudges which can serve as teachable moments when teens face an online risk. A review of the prior literature revealed a need for youth involvement in the design and evaluation of online safety interventions, with few ecologically valid evaluations of solutions. To overcome these gaps, this dissertation focuses on 1) co-designing interventions contextualized to teens online risks, 2) conceptualizing ecologically valid approaches for evaluating nudges with teens, and 3) evaluating the effectiveness of nudges for adolescent online safety in a simulated social media as an ecologically valid environment. Teens most often described facing risks such as information breaches, sexual risks, and cyberbullying. To help deal with these risks, teens designed real-time interventions which often resembled “nudges” that prioritized accountability, risk prevention and community safety. Yet, to move beyond designing interventions to evaluating them, an underlying challenge is the trade-offs between ecological validity and teen safety, as it is difficult to simulate online risks realistically. We conducted a meta-level research study with teens to assess whether the personas, risk scenarios, nudges, and social media tool that we created as study artifacts for a future evaluation were acceptable to teens. Using these findings, we developed a simulated social media to conduct an ecologically valid evaluation of nudges with teens using a Wizard-of-Oz approach. We found that teens find nudges to be most effective and beneficial in high-risk situations such as explicit content exposure and valued the long-term benefits of nudges in behavior change and education. Overall, this research is the first to evaluate adolescent online safety nudges in a realistic simulation, with important implications about how teens respond to nudges, and form trust online.