Carrie James

Harvard University | Harvard · Harvard Graduate School of Education

Public discourse often contains speculation about the impacts of digital technologies on human empathy, kindness, and dignity. Cases of cyberbullying, online hate speech, and oppressive algorithms contribute to perceptions that digital life is a net negative for human compassion. Research findings paint a more nuanced picture of the ways in which d...

Mindfulness is a focused attention to and acceptance of present experiences. Although several reliable and valid multi-item measures of trait mindfulness exist, researchers may sometimes want a short and quick measure of mindfulness. In this project, we developed and validated the Single-Item Mindfulness Scale (SIMS) to assess trait mindfulness. We...

The promise of online dialogue for building cosmopolitan sensibilities in youth has driven the rise of educational programs that leverage digital media for intercultural virtual exchange. While a growing body of research documents the role digital media play in young people’s lives, relatively few studies have examined how young people dialogue in...

Youth well-being, social connectedness, and personality traits, such as empathy and narcissism, are at the crux of concerns often raised about the impacts of digital life. Understanding known impacts, and research gaps, in these areas is an important first step toward supporting media use that contributes positively to youth's happiness, life satis...

The new digital media are a frontier that is rich with opportunities and risks, particularly for young people. Through digital technologies, young people are participating in a range of activities, including social networking, blogging, vlogging, gaming, instant messaging, downloading music and other content, uploading and sharing their own creatio...

An earlier investigation of civically engaged youth's online civic expression, conducted by the authors, revealed that most youth expressed their off-line civic views in their online lives. But do youth change their online civic expression over time? If so, how and why? A follow-up study of the original participants about two years later provides a...

How young people think about the moral and ethical dilemmas they encounter when they share and use online content and participate in online communities. Fresh from a party, a teen posts a photo on Facebook of a friend drinking a beer. A college student repurposes an article from Wikipedia for a paper. A group of players in a multiplayer online game...

While emerging research illuminates how youth engage with digital media, relatively little attention has been given to moral and ethical issues. Drawing on interviews with 61 teens and young adults, we explored the extent to which youth’s approaches to online life include moral or ethical considerations. We report the prevalence of three ways of th...

There is considerable debate about young people’s concern for privacy today, given their frequent use of social media to share information and other content about themselves and others. While researchers have investigated the online privacy practices of teens and emerging adults, relatively little is known about the attitudes and behaviors of young...

This chapter explores the "mental models" of trust that youth utilize in assessing the trustworthiness of others and the implications of such mental models for the future of democratic life. Findings from in depth, semi structured interviews suggest that many youth rely predominately on an earned-through-performance model of trust when assessing th...

Beginning with the generation born at the close of World War II, each successive generation of Americans has become less and less trusting. This chapter explores generational declines in trust using data from an empirical study that compared conceptions of trust between two current generations of Americans. While they shared many similarities, the...

in this study, we investigated children's (ages 10 to 14) stances with respect to the ethics of online identity play through a new experimental methodology. We used a scenario about peer identity misrepresentation embedded in a 3d vir-tual game environment and randomly assigned 265 elemen-tary students (162 female, 103 male) to three conditions tha...

Today's youth inhabit new digital spaces that seem foreign to many adults. These spaces offer unprecedented opportunities for inter-personal connection, but community can break down when people are emboldened by anonymity through pathways that are fast and highly public. Interested in how teens and adults view these ethically charged issues, our th...