Understanding User Reviews of Adolescent Mobile Safety Apps: A Thematic Analysis

Abstract

With the growing use of mobile smart phones among teens, adolescent online safety is becoming more and more challenging. To overcome this problem, parental control applications have been developed. Yet, no one knows why these apps have very low adoption rates nor if they are effective. To address this problem, we previously conducted a structured analysis of existing adolescent online safety apps. In this paper, we briefly summarize our previous results and introduce our new approach for gaining additional insights from the actual users of these apps. We summarize our methodology for doing this and present the results of an initial thematic analysis of user reviews of adolescent online safety apps.