Resumen de Media and Information Literacy Among Children on Three Continents: Insights into the Measurement and Mediation of Well-being
Sonia Livingstone, Patrick Burton, Patricio Cabello, Ellen J Helsper, Petar Kanchev, Daniel Kardefelt Winther, Jelena Petrović, Mariya Stoilova, Ssu-Han Yu
In understanding and promoting positive outcomes for children’s Internet use, media and informationliteracies (MILs) play a crucial mediating role, by enabling opportunities for learning, creating,expressing oneself and participating and by facilitating coping and building resilience. This chapterexplains the approach adopted by Global Kids Online (GKO), a multinational research partnership,seeking to generate robust evidence that can inform policy and practice regarding children’s internetuse in diverse cities and countries internationally. The chapter presents the rationale for GKO’smultidimensional approach to MIL and issues of measurement, social desirability, and cross-nationalcomparison. Additionally, it presents recent findings showing cross-national similarities in higheroperational levels than creative skills and differences between higher and lower income countries;it is noteworthy that gender differences in children’s digital skills are found to be minimal. Havingshown that the GKO quantitative research toolkit successfully operationalizes the range of MILs alsoaddressed by comparable international frameworks, we recommend the approach to future researchers,concluding with an evidence that GKO’s research results are now being used to inform nationalpolicy and practice regarding children’s learning in a digital age.
