The first smartphone. Case reconstructions on the guiding principles of family media education

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Thomas Wenzl
• Subject Area: Educational Research on Socialization, Welfare and Professionalism
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 508875300

In the context of the discourse on the uncertainty of family education in late modernity, the project focusses on an object in which central challenges of family media education are currently condensed: the smartphone. In a case-reconstructive approach, the project investigates how families deal with the educational uncertainties caused by children's first smartphone. The empirical focus is on the spectrum between permissive and restrictive educational responses of parents.On a theoretical level, the project assumes that the smartphone poses great challenges for family media education: On the one hand, parents are inevitably confronted with the social expectation to support their children in the development of a responsible use of the smartphone in the sense of the guiding principle of "responsible parenthood". On the other hand, they have no traditional educational routines at their disposal to cope with this task. Rather, the challenges posed by the smartphone as a new object of family education require that parents have to newly develop an attitude towards their children's smartphone use: They have to find answers to a multitude of questions - for example, from what age they want to allow their children to have their own smartphone, to what online content their children may have access, to what extent their children may use their smartphone, etc. - that correspond to their personal perception of appropriate media education.The project focusses on this situation of parents having to make educational decisions under the condition of great uncertainty on two levels, which are then related to each other: On the first level, the heterogeneous forms of family media education practices and their pedagogical justifications are examined. Here, the explicit educational self-conceptions of parents are in the foreground. On a second level, these self-conceptions are contrasted with parents' pre-reflexive guiding principles of a "good" and "normal" family life. These affectively charged "guiding principles", according to a fundamental theoretical assumption of the project, determine at the latent level which media educational decisions parents perceive as appropriate. Ultimately, they are the decisive factor in determining whether parents are more receptive to pedagogical arguments in favour of permissive media education or whether they are more receptive to arguments suggesting restrictive media education. Through its empirical approach, the project aims to uncover the heterogeneous constructions of a normal family life that give shape to family media education below the level of media pedagogical arguments.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants