Strategies and cues adolescents use to assess the age of an online stranger

Abstract

A common risk among adolescents is sexual solicitation, in which an adolescent is asked to provide sexual information, engage in sexual talk, or in sexual activities. Although scholars increasingly address this topic from an intrapersonal perspective, there is little attention to factors of language use and message content. In two focus group studies, we investigated whether adolescent girls consider themselves capable of assessing whether an online stranger is an adult or a peer, the extent to which adolescent girls actually succeed in making this assessment, the strategies they apply to do so, and the content-and language-related cues focused on. Our findings suggest that most of the adolescent girls are confident in their ability to assess whether the stranger is a peer or an adult with possible sexual intentions. However, we also found that only 43% were able to correctly make this assessment. Most of the adolescents seem to apply the passive strategy of uncertainty reduction: They scan the profile page of the stranger, check contact information, and the profile picture. They may choose to apply the interactive strategy to find out more about the online stranger. Important content-related cues that alarm adolescent girls are: ignoring personal questions, showing an exaggerated amount of interest, acting as a friend, and being sexually oriented. Language cues mentioned related to word usage, abbreviations, sentence length, and tone.ARTICLE HISTORY

Online Grooming: An Exploration into the Genetic-Social Variables Which Enable Victimisation

“…For instance, this could include children deciding what reaction to make when viewing a video depicting a web page where an unknown individual has started speaking to them in a provocative manner. This could be likened to research by Groenestein, Baas, and Van Deursen (2017) where focus groups consisting of teenage females aged 12-17 attempted to decipher if they were communicating with a peer or adult. O'Connell (2003) claimed that the process of online grooming consists of five stages: 'the friendship forming stage, the relationship stage, the risk assessment stage, the exclusivity stage, and the sexual stage' (O'Connell 2003, 9).…”

‘Catfishes: How do they reel us in?’ Exploring adolescent vulnerabilities to online grooming

“…Each fake profile used photos of real people (obtained from Shutterstock), a date of birth, and a first and last name from a random name generator to prevent researcher bias. For authenticity, additional fake Facebook accounts were created to leave comments and to tag the fake personas in posts, as these are elements young people look for when analysing Facebook profiles (Groenestein et al, 2018). The inspect element feature was also used to show posts as having more likes and reacts, and to change the date that posts were made to make them appear older.…”

Understanding hosts’ task performance antecedents in e-rentals

“…Similarly, lower levels of uncertainty are achieved when greater information is obtained through direct questioning and multiple reciprocations, leading to continuous visiting behaviour of SNS (Shin et al, 2017). Also, adolescent girls who feel unsure about a stranger after investigating his profile page, try to clarify their impressions by asking (Groenestein et al, 2018). Therefore, in e-rentals, the extent to which the P2PAP allows hosts to ask questions will positively influence hosts' perceptions of e-rental diagnosticity.…”

“…However, regardless of the absence of face-to-face interaction, engaging in uncertainty reduction strategies in online settings has also been observed. The use of such strategies has been shown in social network sites (SNS) (Antheunis et al , 2010; Groenestein et al , 2018) and mobile dating apps (Corriero and Tong, 2016). Prior research has theorized uncertainty in different contexts and demonstrated that obtaining relevant information to increase the predictability of the behaviour of others is an important strategy to reduce uncertainty (Venkatesh et al , 2016).…”