COMMUNICATION CLIMATES AND PARENTAL MEDIATION APPLIED BY MOTHERS IN PREVENTING CHILDREN FROM THE DANGER OF SOCIAL MEDIA: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH

Abstract

There are some negative impacts happen to children because of social media. Parental mediation, especially from the mother is needed. Therefore, this study investigates communication climates and parental mediation used by mothers. This study attempts to discover the types of communication climates applied by mothers to prevent children from the danger of social media and to explore the types of parental mediation used by mothers to prevent children from the danger of social media. The theories of communication climates by Gibb (1999) and parental mediation proposed by Livingstone and Helsper (2008) were used in this study. This research used a qualitative method with a phenomenological approach as the research design. In addition, the informants of this study consisted of four mothers, two mothers are workers, and two mothers are housewives. The research instrument used in this research was in-depth interviews. This research found that the majority of mothers used problem-oriented communication when they are overseeing their children’ social media use, but there are two mothers, both are workers, who used control communication if the negative impact of social media happened to their children. While parental mediation was also used by mothers and they tend to choose monitoring mediation to oversee their children’s social media use.