Workshop exploring children's understandings of online safety: Storytelling and roleplay as research methods.

This workshop presentation took place as part of a wider event examining the use of creative participatory research methods to enable children to become active research participants. The workshop begins with recognising the lack of research surrounding younger children’s understanding of online environments (Holloway, Green & Livingstone, 2013), suggesting that this may reflect difficulties in involving younger children within research (Olfasson, Livingstone, & Haddon, 2013). The workshop focuses on creative methods,storytelling and roleplay, demonstrating how giving children a voice enables them to become active participants, encouraging children to become active ambassadors for the things that affect them (Pinter, Kuchah & Smith, 2013). The workshop proposes two creative and innovative research methods to ensure the child’s voice is heard within the research environment and focuses on the suitability of using age appropriate storybooks regarding child internet safety, which will be used to gather the young children’s perceptions of internet safety, risk, trust and danger. The workshop will acknowledge the different viewpoints on research with young children, including relevance, reliability, validity and ethics. This workshop thus seeks to examine how storytelling can bu used to encourage the child’s voice, potentially identifying news understandings about methods used to increase children's voices.