Digital location tracking: A preliminary investigation of parents’ use of digital technology to monitor their adolescent’s location.

Abstract

The emergence of digital technologies has changed the dynamic of parent-adolescent relationships. Parents can now use digital technologies to monitor their adolescent's physical location. Yet, to date, no known research has examined the extent to which digital location tracking occurs in parent-adolescent dyads, and how tracking links to adolescent adjustment. The current research examined digital location tracking in a large sample of adolescents (N = 729; M age = 15.03). Overall, about half of parents and adolescents reported digital location tracking. Girls and younger adolescents were more likely to be tracked, and tracking was associated with greater externalizing problems and alcohol consumption; however, these associations were not robust across multiple informants and sensitivity analyses. Positive linkages with externalizing problems and cannabis use were in part contingent on age and positive parenting, with associations emerging for older adolescents and adolescents who report lower positive parenting. Older adolescents are increasingly striving for independence and autonomy, and adolescents who perceive lower positive parenting may view digital tracking as controlling and intrusive. However, results were not robust after statistical correction. This brief report is intended to serve as a preliminary investigation into digital location tracking, and future research is needed to determine the directionality of associations. Possible consequences of parental digital tracking require careful consideration by researchers in order to provide guidance on the best practices for engaging in digital monitoring while nurturing and respecting the parent-adolescent relationship.

Digital location tracking in the parent/caregiver–college student dyad

“…We found that White students were overrepresented among current-trackers, whereas participants who identified as Black were overrepresented among never-trackers. This finding differs from the only study of digital location tracking in adolescence (Burnell et al, 2023), which revealed no racial/ethnic differences, and from studies of offline parental monitoring in adolescence, which suggest that non-White parents/caregivers may hold parenting attitudes that encourage more monitoring compared to their White counterparts (Jambunathan et al, 2000;Lansford et al, 2018;Magariño et al, 2021). Our finding is especially surprising given that parents of color endorse the need to maintain safety as a primary motivation for offline monitoring (Sukk & Siibak, 2021), and the highest endorsed motivation for digital location tracking in our sample was for safety.…”

“…Digital location tracking was quite common in our sample of community college and 4-year university students, with nearly half of our sample endorsing currently (36.1%) or previously (11.0%) being digitally tracked. This finding is consistent with a representative sample of North Carolina adolescents (aged 12-18 years) collected in 2018, which found that 50% of adolescents' parents digitally tracked their location (Burnell et al, 2023). Inconsistent with previous research suggesting more tracking of female adolescents (Burnell et al, 2023), we found no evidence of gender differences in digital location tracking.…”

“…This finding is consistent with a representative sample of North Carolina adolescents (aged 12-18 years) collected in 2018, which found that 50% of adolescents' parents digitally tracked their location (Burnell et al, 2023). Inconsistent with previous research suggesting more tracking of female adolescents (Burnell et al, 2023), we found no evidence of gender differences in digital location tracking. As only 22.7% of our sample identified as male, it is possible that this lack of representativeness accounts this departure from past results.…”

“…Despite recent research examining prevalence (Burnell et al, 2023) and parental motivations for engaging in digital location tracking of their children (Widmer & Albrechtslund, 2021), we know little about how and why families may continue to digitally track their children as they transition to college, and how this digital manifestation of parent/caregiver monitoring may be undermining developmental milestones in this developmental period (i.e., autonomy development and sustained parent-child relatedness). The present study is the first to describe the prevalence and demographic correlates of parent/ caregiver digital location tracking of their college student children and tested whether students who reported being digitally tracked by their parent(s)/caregivers(s) perceived their primary parent/caregiver as engaging in more helicopter parenting and being less supportive of their autonomy.…”

“…Finally, we regressed student perceptions of helicopter parenting and autonomy supportive parenting by their primary parent/caregiver on parent(s)/ caregiver(s) past and current tracking of their college student children (using never as our reference group) in separate models in Mplus 8.6 (Muthén & Muthén, 2021) using a maximum likelihood estimator with robust standard errors (MLR) and full information maximum likelihood for missing data handling (n = 85 missing on tracking variables; Enders & Bandalos, 2001). Key demographic variables were controlled for in analyses to account for potential links with perceptions of helicopter parenting and autonomy supportive parenting, consistent with previous work (Burnell et al, 2023): Gender, race/ ethnicity, and caregiver education. Finally, to better determine unique associations with perceptions of helicopter parenting and autonomy supportive parenting above and beyond general parental involvement, we included parental involvement as a covariate to assess whether digital location tracking was uniquely associated with student perceptions of helicopter parenting and autonomy supportive parenting.…”