Ethnicity-Based Parenting for Child’s Online Safety/Risks

Ethnic vulnerability to risk factors, such as stigmatisation, is inhibitory to parental self-efficacy, either inflating or deflating their confidence in how much they are aware of their child’s online safety/risks.

Confident parents tend to underestimate how frequently their child has experienced online risks, such as a perpetrator or victim of cyberbullying. In contrast, unconfident parents tend to overestimate it.

However, to date, mainstream databases (e.g., Web of Science, Scopus, EBSCO, or ProQuest) show no empirical evidence as a multivariate statistical analysis of the negative association between the self-efficacy and risk awareness among ethnic minority parents in Europe.

Although there is a large dataset of EU Kids Online survey (2018) that provides multi-national and multi-ethnic data (e.g., self-reported use of common language at home) about children and adolescents’ online safety/risks in 19 European countries, it has yet to be used for the statistical analysis of parenting for child’s online-safety among ethnic minorities.

One reason is the lacked focus on cross-national and -ethnic validation of scales that can measure national and ethnic variations in the parental self-efficacy and awareness; another reason is the lack of theoretical and conceptual models6 applicable to the cross-national and -ethnic comparison.

Relying on the EU Kids online data, the proposed project (entitled as EU EB-PARENTING - Ethnicity-Based Parenting for Child’s Online Safety/Risks) will bridge this research gap in an innovative way by proposing a novel (a) theoretical framework, (b) conceptual model, and (c) measurement scale of ethnicity-based parenting for child’s online safety/risks, especially among ethnic minorities in Europe.

Given that an outstanding ethnic difference is observable in gender roles, the novelty further ensues from taking into account interaction effects of parent-child gender differences on the risk awareness, mediation, and self-efficacy.