INTERNET USAGE OF YOUNG CHILDREN

Internet usage of young children

Abstract

In the field of computers and Internet, children are often more comfortable, informed and educated than their parents. Today, children learn, play, communicate, work and form groups with very different social order than their parents. Internet access in schools contributes largely to tackling inequalities, because it shows very little variation with social status. It is perhaps for this reason that children are more likely to become compulsive users of Internet than their parents. More and more families are connected to the Internet. This could be explained by the fact that Parents think their children have the need for Internet access at home to keep up with their friends. This proposal outlines the research design which will be conducted to examine the use of internet among young children and their parents.

Table of Contents

Introduction4

Research Question4

Research instrument and procedure4

Methodology5

Statistical analysis5

Result and its Interpretation6

Ethical Issues7

Limitations, directions for future research and conclusions7

References9

Appendix10

Internet usage of young children

Introduction

A research indicates that children spend more time watching television, computer or video game consoles. They spend about six hours daily in front of the computer screen. According to researchers the Web activity is causing barriers between parents and children, while a third of young people insist they cannot live without their computer.

According to the study of children aged 5 to 16 years, children build multimedia centers in their rooms that consist of consoles, Internet access and MP3 players from the age of seven. This includes those children who wake in the morning and sleep at night. Girls, especially, tend to chat online with friends at night. 38% children take their consoles to bed instead of a book.

Research Question

Building on the available conceptual and empirical base, we focus on the following research question and this from a long-term perspective. The latter implies that we consistently check what trends can be observed over time:

To what extent does the Internet use of children and young adults reflect unsafe Internet use?

Research instrument and procedure

The research instrument used is the questionnaire survey which consisted of two sections: a section for children and young adults and a section for their parents.The survey research method will be used for this study. The survey will consist of questionnaire for both the children and young adults and also their parents. The questionnaire will consist of both open and closed-ended questions. Open-ended questions are conversational; the interviewer records everything the respondent says.

Open-ended questions are very costly in survey time to administer and analyze by researchers; for these reasons, closed-ended questions are much more common in survey research. Closed-ended questions provide response options for a respondent to identify and select. There are many ways of structuring the response alternatives for closed-ended questions, but the most common is to ask a respondent to select an item from a rating scale.

Methodology

To justify the research question the research will do a content analysis of the data that is gathered from the questionnaire. The participants will be 50 parents and their children in the age ...