As a component of the INFO-272 Research course at the School of Information, I lead an independent qualitative research study in order to explore the perception of threat in a range of online abuse situations through the contexts, themes and experience of five self-identifying women.
Motivation
Online abuse is becoming an increasingly prevalent issue in modern day society, with 41% of Americans having experienced online harassment in some capacity in 2021. People who identify as women, in particular, can be subjected to a wide range of abusive behaviour online, with gender-specific experiences cited broadly in recent literature across fields such as blogging, politics and journalism.
Compounded to this, present approaches to online safety, such as black-box content moderation and ambiguous platform community guidelines are a growing area of concern for a broad group of stakeholders. The goal of this research was to explore the perception of threat in online abuse through the contexts, themes and experiences of self-identifying females, and how the bounds of specific platforms might impact them.
Findings
Across a sample of 5 female-identifying interview participants recruited from Instagram, a breadth of ‘abusive’ situations were explored; ranging from single negatively-worded interactions to those ultimately resulting in unsolicited physical meetings. The concept of ‘online abuse’ was interpreted personally by each participant, however, each definition centred upon ‘negative online experiences’. Some definitions extended to aggression and explicit threats, yet others were more indirect, such as a non-verbal interactions with abusive content.
READ THE FULL REPORT HERE.
Participant Feedback
Before publicly disseminating the outputs of this research, draft deliverables were shared with participants in order to consolidate their experiences with their representation in the research. At this point, feedback was received from the interview participants, with an example included on the left. It was important to ensure the community voices captured in this study were represented in a way that felt secure and authentic to those involved.
Dissemination of findings: Instagram Carousel Post
In addition to the final research report, the findings from this work were summarised into an Instagram carousel post design aimed at disseminating the key findings within the research context itself. A prototype of this design can be found below:
