Creating a Pipeline to Standardize and Analyze Qualitative Data Regarding the Digital Ecology of Fear

In our current digital landscape, parents are struggling to grasp the digital environment their children are engaging with. With technology advancing at such a rapid pace, an adaptive lag in parenting methods is being observed. Simply stated, the methods parents experienced in childhood are no longer effective as the landscape of technology has changed so drastically. The intelligibility of each digital threat impacts parents’ perception and the level of parental investment they can or will commit to addressing that risk. Our goal is to broaden our understanding of the threats parents acknowledge and their methods to address these risks, against the existing digital landscape. Using a survey we aim to capture parents’ recall vs recognition of digital threats and their level of parental investment in mitigating risks. The survey responses will be placed in a latent dirichlet allocation model to sort the free response answers into topics and streamline the analysis of the qualitative data. We hypothesize the results will show parents recalling and addressing concrete threats over abstract threats. The results will help inform what future resources can be created to help parents understand and mitigate digital threats their children encounter.