Research.

Current Research

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.Girls Social Media Project (2017-2019)
GU Ref. No. 2017/568
www.girlssocialmediaproject.com
 
The Girls Social Media Project investigates teenage girls’ experience with social media, friendship, online bullying, and image-based troubles. Girls aged 12 to 14 are the focus of this work because they are more likely than any other demographic to experience online bullying and depression and anxiety from bullying episodes.

The project asks these three questions:
  1. what practices and strategies do girls use to establish their online identity;
  2. how are social expectations, norms, and attitudes integrated into their social media practice; and
  3. how are challenges and difficulties faced by girls negotiated both on and offline?

Critical to this work is a focus on social norms and attitudes that contribute to girls’ social media practices and their online identity construction. Using principles of design ethnography, participating girls will produce self-help resources for other girls their age. Through design-based processes, the project aims to produce a robust model for understanding the everyday experiences and online interactions of teenage girls. Findings are expected to inform online safety and well-being agendas as well as ground-level translation of safety recommendations into effective school-based practice.
This project is funded by Griffith Institute for Educational Research and the Arts, Education, & Law group at Griffith University.

Preliminary findings

Previous Research

 Digital Games and Learning: Stakeholders and considerations in educational game design (2017), Research for Educational Impact, Deakin University, VIC, Australia.

Teen Girls’ Online Participation: An Australian Study (2016). Doctoral Dissertation. School of Education and Professional Studies, Griffith University, QLD, Australia.

Serious Play: Using digital games in school to promote literacy and learning in the 21st century (2012 – 2015). ARC Linkage Project, Griffith Institute for Educational Research, QLD, Australia. 
 ​Serious Play website.