Peer to Peer Research Project
Funded by the Susan Crown Exchange through their Youth Voice Challenge, Erikson Institute’s Alexis Lauricella, PhD will launch a two-year pilot research and development project that empowers adolescent youth in Evanston, IL to help each other use digital technology in healthy and productive ways. First, a group of 11th grade students will design, conduct, and analyze adolescent focus group data research to understand and document the positive and negative ways in which their peers use, experience, and understand digital technology. From these research results, high school students will work to develop a research-informed peer-to-peer technology mentoring curriculum for 7th grade students.
This project seeks three critical outcomes:
Honor adolescent voice and experience related to technology use
Provide adolescents with research and curriculum development experience that will enhance their digital citizenship competencies
Build interpersonal relationships between younger and older adolescents
Erikson Institute is a member of SCE’s Youth Voice Challenge cohort. This group of exemplary organizations seeks answers to the question: How can young people inspire their peers to use technology in healthy ways and make digital spaces better for everyone? Learn more about the Challenge here.
Erikson Institute brings a strong peer-to-peer learning approach to this project by training high school students as both researchers and mentors for middle school students. Their research-practice model will bring a strong youth agency component to a field of research where genuine youth voice has been conspicuously absent.
See below for examples for other related research projects by Alexis R. Lauricella:
Carter, M. C., Cingel, D. P., Lauricella, A. R., & Wartella, E. (2020). 13 Reasons Why, perceived norms, and reports of mental health-related behavior change among adolescent and young adult viewers in four global regions. Communication Research.
Lauricella, A. R. & Cingel, D. P. (2020). Parental influence on youth media use. Journal of Child and Family Studies doi:10.1007/s10826-020-01724-2
Hurwitz, L., Lauricella, A. R., Hightower, B., Sroka, I., Woodruff, T. K., & Wartella, E. (2016). “When you’re a baby you don’t have puberty”: Understanding of puberty and human reproduction in late childhood and early adolescence. Journal of Early Adolescence.
Wartella, E., Beaudoin-Ryan, L., Blackwell, C. K., Cingel, D. P., Hurwitz, L. B., & Lauricella, A. R. (2015). What kind of adults will our children become? The impact of growing up in a media-saturated world. Journal of Children and Media. 10.1080/17482798.2015.1124796.
Blackwell, C., Lauricella, A., Wartella, E., & Conway, A. (2014). Children and the Internet: Developmental implications of web site preferences among 8- to 12-year-old children. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 58 (1), 1-20. DOI: 10.1080/08838151.2013.875022
Cingel, D. P., Lauricella, A. R., Wartella, E., & Conway, A. (2013). Predicting social networking site use and online communication practices among adolescents: The role of access and device ownership. Media and Communication, 1(1), 28-38. doi: 10.12924/mac2013.01010028
The post Peer to Peer Research Project appeared first on TEC Center.