Student online behavior study

     Students should encounter smaller online risks to help prepare them to handle bigger risks, according to a study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University. "Our stance is that teens will inevitably be exposed to some level of online risk; thus, they need to learn how to deal with it before the risk becomes too great," the researchers wrote. 82% of the study participants reported at least one "risk event." On average they reported about three risk events during the study; the range was from zero to 15. The most common type — reported by 74% of participants — was exposure to explicit content, which in two-thirds of the incidents occurred accidentally. 15% reported online harassment, 24 percent information breaches and 28% at least one sexual solicitation.
     The teen participants seemed to cope with their online problems fairly well by ignoring the content (40% of the time) or leaving the site, confronting the offender or fixing it themselves (47%). They were most likely to communicate with someone else regarding an online harassment incident and least likely to communicate about exposure to explicit content. For online harassment, specifically, 77% of the reports said that teens told their mothers, 11% told their best friends, and 11% reported it to the social media website. 49% were considered resolved by the time the teen recorded their diary entries; 17% were considered "so insignificant" to the teens that they felt no resolution was required.
Wisniewski, P., et al. (2016). Dear diary: Teens reflect on their weekly online risk experiences.  Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, p. 3919-3930
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2858317http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2858317