Aims and overview

EU Kids Online (2006-09) is a thematic network examining European research on cultural, contextual and risk issues in children's safe use of the internet and online technologies. It was funded by the European Commission's Safer Internet Plus Programme (Directorate-General Information Society and Media), coordinated by the London School of Economics and Political Science and guided by international and national policy advisers. The aim was to identify, compare and draw conclusions from existing and ongoing research at the intersection of three domains:

• • Children (up to 18 years old) and their families.

• • Online technologies, especially the internet.

• • European empirical research and policy on risk and safety.

Research teams from 21 member states were chosen for diversity across countries and research expertise: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

Specific objectives

The objectives, achieved via seven work packages, were:

• • Data availability: identify and evaluate available data on children’s/ families’ use of the internet and online technologies, noting key gaps in the evidence base.

• • Research contexts: understand the national and institutional contexts of research and inform the future research agenda.

• • Cross-national comparisons: compare findings across diverse European countries, contextualising similarities and differences so as to identify opportunities, risks and safety issues.

• • Methodologies for good research practice: guide researchers in meeting the methodological challenge of studying children online crossnationally.

• • Policy recommendations: develop evidence-based policy recommendations for awareness raising, media literacy and other actions promoting safer internet use.

• • Dissemination: disseminate research findings, methods guidance, recommendations and all outputs to public, academic and policy audiences.

• • Network management: network researchers across Europe to share and compare data, findings, theory, disciplines and methodological approaches.

Online database (data repository)

The EU Kids Online network constructed a publicly accessible and fully searchable database of all empirical studies conducted and identified across Europe, provided they meet a certain quality threshold. The data repository is available online at www.lse.ac.uk/collections/ EUKidsOnline/. It contains the details of almost 400 separate studies (355 of them single country studies; if findings for each country in a multicountry study are counted separately, the total is over 600 studies).