An empirical investigation of digital parenting self-efficacy among Turkish parents

Integration of digital technologies into personal and societal endeavors has led to significant transformations in individuals' relevant roles. Parenting is one of such contexts where these transformations emerge. These transformations bring about additional parenting roles such as sustaining effective and salubrious digital access and protecting children from potential harms. Parents are considered as primary stakeholders while transforming potential risks of digital life to opportunities and sustaining safe use of digital tools. In this regard, being a digital parent emerges as a crucial competency and field of study. The primary purpose of the current study is to investigate digital parenting competencies and indicators, and to developed the scale for examined Turkey's situation of several variables by means of this scale. This study was used inductive analysis of the qualitative data analysis, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, descriptive statistics, along independent samples t-test were conducted along with one-way between-groups ANOVAs. Both survey design and descriptive methods were employed to realize the research purposes. To develop the scale, research data were collected in 2016-2017 school year, and to investigate the perceptions of Turkish parents, in 2017-2018 spring semester. As a result of this study digital parenting self-efficacy scale consisting of 38 items and having three factor structure was developed. Collected data from Turkey shows that parents are so proficient in digital safety dimension and to follow this dimension digital literacy and digital communication.