Research and Evaluation - Our Approach
At MediaSmarts, our educational resources, public awareness campaigns and policy recommendations are grounded in the best available evidence pertaining to digital and media literacy. In collaboration and consultation with various partners, our research team specializes in designing and facilitating both qualitative and quantitative community-based research projects and robust evaluations of all our digital media literacy programs and resources.
Through a community-based research approach, our projects honour participants’ diverse range of digital media literacy strengths, experiences and expertise. Many of our research projects involve working with children and youth from communities across Canada. We design projects that create safe spaces for especially youth participants to share their thoughts, experiences, concerns and solutions about digital media literacy issues. We aim to empower participants by providing them with knowledge and skills that they can take with them as they continue to navigate the online world and digital technology. We appreciate the time that all participants take to engage in our projects and the research team is always looking for new ways to collaborate with participants , acknowledging them as experts.
Our longest-running research project – Young Canadians in a Wireless World (YCWW) - is the largest and most comprehensive study of how children and youth use the internet and digital technology in Canada. Phase I of this project began in 2000 and Phase IV results were released in 2023.
In addition to our YCWW research, we lead projects on a wide range of digital media literacy issues, including online privacy and consent, algorithmic literacy, online harms (including hate and mis/disinformation), digital well-being and collective online resilience, digital equity and the digital divide and ethical digital citizenship. All our research and evaluation projects follow the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans - TCPS 2 (2018), and all projects involving human subjects are reviewed by the research ethics board at the centre for community-based research.
These ethical protocols require that we clearly state our project goals, purpose, benefits (including participant compensation) and data collection methods in addition to outlining clear recruitment and informed consent processes. Furthermore, we are required to clarify how we mitigate any risks to participants, specifically individuals and groups identified as vulnerable – paying specific attention to research involving Indigenous peoples as well as children and youth.