There are two sides to every story: young people’s perspectives of relationship issues on social media and adult responses

This paper reports on a recent research project undertaken in the UK that investigated how young people negotiate their identities and relationships online, including how they experience interventions by adults. Drawing on qualitative interviews with young people in two schools and a voluntary youth organisation in England, we argue that young people engage rather successfully in practices of self-governance. Our findings based on this sample of young people’s agentic practice and care for their peers challenge some dominant perceptions of young people’s online practices as risky and/or harmful to themselves and/or others. Furthermore we found a lack of evidence concerning the effectiveness of, and need for, interventions orientated around surveillance and zero tolerance.

"our sample of young people are able to manage simultaneously different categories of relationships online via eight prominent social media sites. They are able to learn how to maintain a balance between individualism and communitarianism. Each young person is simultaneously responsible for (i) maintaining his/her self-narrative; and (ii) ensuring his/her and others’ actions do not restrict peers maintaining their self-narratives. Although we have found evidence of the value of e-safety measures and adult intervention we have not found evidence, which sufficiently supports the effectiveness of online surveillance and zero tolerance policies. Rather, these young people favour interventions with trusted adults in safe spaces offline. They wish to develop their personalagencies to maintain both their individual identities and online community responsibilities. (Edwards and Wang, 2018: 729-30).