Parentally Controlled?

Software	None
Covers	Role of technology in society, social media, ethics
Skills Required	Interest in ethics, interest in the role of computers in society
Challenge	Conceptual ??? Technical ??? Programming

Brief Description

A lot of parents are very concerned about what their children... and adolescents... and young adults... do with computers, especially what they do with social media and the world wide web. Parents get offered technological solutions to the problem of restricting what their children do. Some people want this. Others strongly object on principle, or would rather trust their children's judgement than self-appointed guardians whose beliefs and attitudes they don't know or trust. But what does this look like to the parentally controlled?

The aim of this project is to investigate what people who are young enough to have experienced parental controls, or alternatively the active choice of their parents not to use them, think of parental controls, and what effects the controls had on their relationships with their parents or peers, either from current experience or with the benefit of a bit of hindsight, and see what ethical or practical lessons can be drawn from this.

WARNING: Unlike nearly all computing-related project topics, this is one where the ethical issues involved in doing primary research are serious and awkward. Not only will it mean taking the ethical review form very seriously, it will mean making sure that research procedures are fit for purpose and strictly adhered to, and guarantees of confidentiality are delivered on. You should assume that ethical approval will need to go to the Faculty Ethics Committe, and that we mean it about not starting primary research without ethical approval.

Variants

Ideally, a project on this topic would be fairly narrowly focused on a particular national or social group, or would draw comparisons between different groups.

An alternative project would be to focus on the theory of computer ethics, and investigate the ethical justifications for parental controls on internet access (etc) and consider how well they work, and whether they make unwarranted assumptions or impose particular religious or philosophical or ideological beliefs, or fit how the real world really works, without doing any actual research into people's experience of it. Is this software development it is immoral to do, or only morally okay given particular conditions?

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