An Exploratory Study Into the Negotiation of Cyber-Security Within the Family Home

Given the increasingly young age that children are using technology and accessing the internet and its associated risks, it is important we understand how families manage and negotiate cyber-security within the home. We conducted an exploratory qualitative study with thirteen families (14 parents and 19 children) in the south-west of the United Kingdom about their main cyber-security concerns and management strategies. Thematic analysis of the results revealed that families were concerned about cyberbullying, online stranger danger, privacy, content, financial scams, and technical threats. Both parents and children drew on family, friends and trusted others as resources, and used a variety of strategies to manage these threats including rules and boundaries around technology, using protective functions of technology, communication and education around safety. There were tensions between parents and children over boundaries, potentially putting families at risk if children break household rules around cyber-security. Finally, parents expressed the feeling they were in a ‘whole new world’ of cyber-security threats, and that positive and negative aspects of technology must be constantly balanced. However, parents also felt that the challenges in managing family security are the same ones that have always faced parents – it is just that the context is now digital as well as physical.

"families articulated a range of cyber-security concerns, from online content, online strangers, to financial threats, similar to other research (e.g., Zhang Kennedy et al., 2016). Parental priorities around these threats were underlined by the potential ramifications for the physical and emotional safety of their children, expressing greater concerns around cyberbullying, online stranger danger and online content, compared to financial or technical threats. Families draw on a variety of resources to manage these new demands (RQ2). These resources can be social (such as asking others for help), or personal (such as using their own knowledge to instigate technical solutions) or could be using the security features embedded within the technology itself. However, parents also identified their own perceived limitations in technical knowledge or features of the technology (or media platform) itself as barriers to their ability to cope with the security demands of using technology within the home. Each family balances the benefits and costs of adopting technology within the home (RQ3), as illustrated in our participants discussions about the positive (enhanced communication within and without the family) and negative aspects (such as perceived detrimental impact upon behavior) of the technology they are using. All these aspects predict how families cope with the demands of adopting new technologies within the home in terms of which strategies they adopt in approaching cyber-security in the family (RQ4). For instance, some families instill rules and boundaries around acceptable online behavior and cyber-risks, and some rely on communication between family members to manage security in the family. We suggest that our final, wider set of themes reflect potential social, personal and technological outcomes (RQ5): families devise new ways of living, because of the rapid development of technology and adoption into family life in terms of new rules and guidelines. Some parents seek to avoid the security and technological implications for as long as possible, and some parents feel the speed in which technology develops means it is difficult to keep their children safe in the digital world... the variations in coping responses and strategies adopted by parents in managing cyber-security (e.g., monitoring versus communication) likely represents a combination of their perception of acceptable cyber-risk, perceptions about the most effective ways of managing this risk and their parenting style in general... The boundaries of acceptable cyber-security risk within the home, and how these risks were managed were negotiated and re-negotiated as children grew up in the digital world. Initially, boundaries around when, where and how children can use devices were often imposed by parents in order to control the risk of their young children accessing inappropriate content and minimizing the risk of any negative influences upon their behavior." (Muir and Joinson, 2020: 11).