The Parental and Individual Predictors of Sharenting within a Turkish Speaking Sample

ABSTRACT: Parents routinely share contents of their children on social media. This parenting behaviour is referred to as "sharenting,". Parental levels of digital literacy, parents’ levels of privacy awareness, and their viewpoints on the right of children to self-determination could affect parents' sharenting practice. The relationship between sharenting, these concepts and parents' and children's demographic variables were investigated in this study. Additionally, content analysis was done in order to investigate the shares made by the parents. In the correlational analysis, the percentage of sharenting was found to be correlated weakly with the gender of the parents, with the number of children and parents' scores of risk of privacy. In the regression analysis, the age of parents, the gender of parents, the number of children, the age of the child and the gender of the child, and the risk of privacy significantly predicted sharenting, while parents' perception of children's right to self-determination, parents' online privacy concerns, and digital literacy scores of parents did not. In the content analysis, the children were alone in 34.6% of the photos, and the highest among themes was daily photos with approximately 25%. Looking at the total risk of privacy scores of the photos, approximately 45% did not put the privacy of children at risk. In conclusion, the content analysis made in this study is very important to understand the sharing behavior of parents and it can be said that new concepts that may be related to the sharing practice should be investigated. Future studies might examine what happened to the photographs once they are made public and how that affects the children and their parents. Keywords: sharenting, privacy, digital literacy, self-determination, content analysis