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The “Blurred Lives Project – a cross-national, co-participatory exploration of cyberbullying, young people and socio-economic disadvantage” brought together five European partners (from Northern Ireland, London, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands) with specific expertise and experience in tackling cyberbullying. The four central SMART objectives of the project were as follows: 1. To empower young people aged 14-16 to better understand, prevent and combat cyberbullying. 2. To develop the most useful support materials for teachers, parents/carers and young people (aged 14-16) for signalling, preventing and combating cyberbullying, and to make recommendations to social networking providers. 3. To determine how the young people understand, experience and respond to the present conditions of cyberbullying. 4. To determine the relationship between socio-economic disadvantage and young people's understanding and experiences of cyberbullying and their responses/coping strategies.The title of the project is a reflection of the shift in recent years from the “wired” to the “wireless” child and the consequent blurring of online and offline identities, realities and experiences for many young people whose social interactions are increasingly dominated by mobile technologies (Slee, Campbell & Spears, 2012; Spears & Kofoed, 2013; Ofcom, 2018).The project was innovative in its focus on cyberbullying among young people in five different regions of the European Union, but also in terms of its co-participatory methodology, involving, training and empowering young people as co-researchers. In seeking to work with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, the study also uniquely explored across 5 EU countries how these young people are affected by cyberbullying. The project involved young people in Sequential Focus Groups and Quality Circles through which they were empowered to co-create a range of accessible, up-to-date resources aimed at teachers, fellow pupils, parents/carers, and social networking providers.The project had two principal phases. In phase 1 young people in each partner region (aged 14-16) were invited to respond to a survey of their experiences of cyberbullying and other negative online behaviours. This survey was completed by 2687 young people (400-700 pupils in 5+ schools in each country) making it one of the most extensive European surveys of young people's online behaviours and experiences. Pupils were first invited to provide background demographic information and to detail the nature and extent of their regular online activity. They were then asked to describe a nasty or unpleasant online experience that had happened to them personally over the past couple of months, to indicate who they had reported it to (if anyone) and what happened as a result. They were also asked to describe a nasty online experience that had happened to someone else they know well, and to describe anything nasty or unpleasant that they had done themselves to someone online over the past couple of months. Finally, the survey invited the young people to provide suggestions as to how teachers, parents/carers and friends could help more. In phase 2 the project was unique in its use of the Quality Circle approach combined with Sequential Focus Groups for the first time with a total of 237 pupils aged 14-16 from lower socio-economic backgrounds in 10 schools in five European partner countries, where previously Cowie and Sharp (1994) and Paul et al. (2010, 2012) had implemented the Quality Circle approach (with no SFGs) with much smaller numbers of primary school children and younger secondary school pupils in England alone.The project produced 4 Intellectual Outputs targeted at an audience of teachers (IO1: Lessons and Guide for Teachers); young people (IO2: Comic Book for Pupils); families (IO3: Guide for Parents/Carers) and internet providers (IO4: Summary Recommendations). Outputs 1-3 are available in English, Dutch, German and Italian. Output 4 is available in English. For outputs 1-3 a further extended version was created (in English) for those who wanted further guidance and information and further examples of pupil work.As such this is a project which was innovative in focus and design, but which has also increased understanding and confidence of hundreds of young people across all 5 partner countries, as well as leading to a range of attractive, innovative resources for teachers, pupils and parents which are available in 4 languages for use in schools across Europe. It is hoped that these resources will be widely used in schools and families leading to greater understanding of online dangers but also promoting greater support for young people including those from disadvantaged social backgrounds.
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