I'm a grown up, get me into here: on-line research with children and young people

Common portrayals of social networking in the media include descriptions of social networking sites as places that help young people to be young and let them "practice" youth. However, recent media reports have attempted to highlight, and arguably entrench, inter-generational barriers to social networking. These include, amongst others, concerns about safety, identity formation and surveillance. This paper seeks to explore the methodological and ethical dilemmas of researching intergenerational social networking by exploring: the variations in expectation, and experience, of online intergenerational social networking? The variations in the types of concern held by participants? Concerns relating to autonomy, identity, fear and the unpredictable and "isky" aspects of online communication Brookfield and Preskill (2005) present particular ethical dilemmas. We intend to examine these dilemmas by using Activity Theory to explain how social artefacts and social organisation mediate social action (Engeström, 1987)