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theses

The influx of information communication technologies (ICTs) into the modern family household can create tension between teens’ right to access and autonomy and parents’ right to mediate their ICT activities that needs to be accommodated within the everyday routines of the family. As a part of their everyday lives teens’ must negotiate the sometimes-opposing motivations of their parents, the everyday family routine, and an increasing number of digital devices and information technologies. Though there has been a great deal of research into the methods parents use to mediate and monitor their children’s technology use (Livingstone & Helsper, 2008; Clark, 2011), there has been very little investigation into the ways that teens negotiate their parents’ practices or how their ICT interactions are related to their family. This dissertation explored these issues through an in-depth look at the families of eight 14-16-year-old Puerto Rican and Dominican teenagers living in the US. To do this it utilized a mixed-methods approach that included surveys, semi-structured in-home family interviews, a teen mapping activity, and individual interviews with both teenagers and their parent(s) for each family. The resulting data was coded and analyzed according to the constant comparative method and typologies were developed of parental and teen practices. The findings provide a holistic understanding of teens’ everyday information practices within the family context. The narratives that parents and teens expressed throughout the interviews situated their practices within their personal contexts and their understanding of reality and seemed to be linked with the combinations of practices they described, as well as the dynamic between them. Overall, the teens generally described abiding by parents’ rules and respecting their authority. They did not see their parents’ mediation as outside of their parental rights and they attempted to use ICTs within the structure of what they believed their parents considered appropriate and would maintain the balance of their relationship. At the same time, teens described negotiating these constraints in ways that enabled them to pursue their own interests and meet many of the ICT expectations of their peer and academic worlds. The creativity they brought to this task appeared to influence the extension of their personal information ecologies, and consequently their ability to negotiate for their own needs and their access to ICT resources.

ETD_8437

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Stefani E. Gomez

doi:10.7282/T3F76GPK

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.