Exploring parental mediation of internet use through children's viewpoints

Parents' attitudes and supervision are important for their children to benefit from online opportunities and beware of the pertaining risks. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the parental mediation of children's Internet use. The study was designed with a cross-sectional survey model. Data were collected from 416 secondary school students in the 2018-2019 academic year. Firstly, the theoretical framework of the study and the variables were determined, and an item pool was prepared. Then, scale development studies were conducted. Exploratory (n=868) and confirmatory (n=360) factor analysis were conducted using data from two separate samples. As a result of the analysis, the parental mediation scale with four factors and 23 items with an explained variance of 50.04% was obtained. The parental mediation scale has four factors as monitoring, safety, active and technical. In order to investigate parental mediation with regard to several background variables, inferential statistical techniques (independent sample t-test, one-way analysis of variance) were used. Results showed a medium level of parental mediation from the perspective of secondary school students. No significant differences were observed in parental mediation with regard to age, education level and gender of the children, the number of children in the family, the educational status of their parents and the family income. Based on the results of the research, suggestions regarding the parents, institutions and researchers are presented.