Digital skills among youth: A dataset from a three-wave longitudinal survey in six European countries.

This dataset provides longitudinal survey data from a European project, ySKILLS, which was focused on the role of digital skills in youths' development. It contains data from 10,821 participants from Grades 6-10 (in Wave 1) in Estonia, Finland, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Portugal. The data was collected between Spring 2021 and Spring 2023, the participants were recruited through schools, where the data collection also took place, except for online data collections due to restrictions caused by COVID-19. The dataset is novel in its multidimensional approach to the construct of digital literacy. It provides insight into the development of digital skills in youth and the role of digital skills and internet usage in youths' positive and negative online experiences and wellbeing. It also contains data that allows for the analysis of the role of digital skills in class networks. The data are beneficial for researchers interested in the examination of youths' online skills, internet usage, online experiences, and wellbeing from a longitudinal perspective.

Who Is Searching for Cyberhate? Adolescents' Characteristics Associated with Intentional or Unintentional Exposure to Cyberhate.

Cyberhate is one of the online risks that adolescents can experience online. It is considered a content risk when it is unintentionally encountered and a conduct risk when the user actively searches for it. Previous research has not differentiated between these experiences, although they can concern different groups of adolescents and be connected to distinctive risk factors. To address this, our study first focuses on both unintentional and intentional exposure and investigates the individual-level risk factors that differentiate them. Second, we compare each exposed group of adolescents with those who were not exposed to cyberhate. We used survey data from a representative sample of adolescents (N = 6,033, aged 12-16 years, 50.3 percent girls) from eight European countries-Czechia, Finland, Flanders, France, Italy, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia-and conducted multinomial logistic regression. Our findings show that adolescents with higher sensation seeking, proactive normative beliefs about aggression (NBA), and who report cyberhate perpetration, are at higher risk of intentionally searching for cyberhate contents compared with those who are unintentionally exposed. In comparison with unexposed adolescents, reporting other risky experiences was a risk factor for both types of exposure. Furthermore, NBA worked differently-reactive NBA was a risk factor for intentional exposure, but proactive NBA did not play a role and even decreased the chance of unintentional exposure. Digital skills increased both types of exposure. Our findings stress the need to differentiate between intentional and unintentional cyberhate exposure and to examine proactive and reactive NBA separately.

Bystanders' Victim Blaming and Minimizing Consequences of Weight-Based Cyberhate Attacks: The Roles of anti-Fat Attitudes, Body-Positive Online Content, and Gender.

Physical appearance and, specifically, weight are common reasons for cyberhate attacks among adolescents. Using a between-subject experimental design, this study focuses on the bystanders of such attacks on Instagram. We investigate bystanders' assessments in the form of two moral disengagement (MD) mechanisms-victim blaming and minimizing consequences-and we compare the assessments of attacks that are diversified by the victim's weight (i.e., a victim who is plus-size and a victim who is thinner). We also examine the moderating roles of bystanders' prejudice against people who are plus-size in the form of the so-called anti-fat attitudes, their frequency of viewing body-positive online content, and gender. The study's data come from an online survey conducted in 2020 with a representative sample of 658 Czech adolescents, aged 13-18. We tested our hypotheses with structural equation modeling. The results show that the two MD mechanisms work differently. The victim's displayed weight affected the bystanders' tendency to victim blame: adolescents blamed the victim who is plus-size more than the victim who is thinner, but the victim's weight made no difference in minimizing the consequences of the incident. A moderating effect for anti-fat attitudes and gender was found for victim blaming. Bystanders with higher anti-fat attitudes and boys blamed the victim who is plus-size more than the victim who is thinner. On the other hand, there was no effect for the frequency of viewing body-positive online content for either of the MD mechanisms. The results are discussed with regard to the differences between the two mechanisms and the practical implications for educational and prevention programs for youth.