Wannes Heirman

AP University College · Management and Communication

Cyberbullying threatens young people's well-being. This study is one of the first to examine cyber-bullying from a social network perspective. The class-based friendship networks of 103 classes were reconstructed using peer-nomination questionnaires. Closeness centralization and the global clustering coefficient were calculated using social network...

Adolescent sexting – the electronic swapping of sexually intimate texts or images – has attracted significant media and policy attention. However, questions remain about the predictors of this phenomenon, in which mobile phones play a central role in adolescents’ exploration of sexuality. Therefore, a survey involving 498 adolescents aged between 1...

Abstract This study adopts a global theoretical framework to predict adolescents' disclosure of personal information in exchange for incentives offered by commercial Websites. The study postulates and tests the validity of a model based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB), including antecedent factors of attitude and perceived behavioral contro...

It is common nowadays for parents to share information about their children on social network sites (SNSs). However, little is known on how adolescents think and feel about this sharenting behavior. Therefore, this study explores adolescents' perception of the reasons why parents share information about their adolescent children on SNSs, and adoles...

Becoming friends on Facebook does not always guarantee long-term friendships as users have the possibility to unfriend people. This unfriending behaviour is frequently occurring and might have negative consequences for both parties. To gain insight into the factors influencing adolescents’ unfriending, the current study made use of an extended vers...

This study is the first to examine adolescents' reasons for unfriending people on Facebook. By means of open-end questions, 419 participants described the primary online (i.e., arising from friends' behavior on Facebook) or offline (i.e., emerging from Facebook friends' offline behavior) reason for which they recently unfriended someone. Two resear...

Social network sites (SNSs) provide adolescents with the opportunity to expand their social circle, which is associated with increased social capital. However, the social capital adolescents built depends on the quality of their friendships on SNSs. As no instruments are available to capture the quality of friendships on SNSs, this study designed a...

This study offers empirical insight into adolescents’ norms around sexting. Informed by sexual scripting theory, we investigated the extent to which young people perceive sexting as being a likely behavior in the context of a romantic relationship (the “sexting script”). A distinction is made between what adolescents find likely among same-aged pee...

Although social media offer adolescents new possibilities for emotion regulation, little is known about how adolescents use different platforms to this end. This study adds to the emotion regulation literature and affordances-of-technologies perspective by describing whether and how adolescents use different social media platforms (Facebook, Instag...

Deze studie onderzoekt het voorkomen van cyberpesten bij Vlaamse jongeren en de link met internetgebruik en uiteenlopende internet-opvoedingspraktijken die ouders toepassen.

Social sharing of emotions is a frequently used emotion regulation strategy. This study adds to the emotion regulation literature and the affordances of technologies perspective by providing a better understanding of with whom adolescents share emotions on- and offline, how they do this and why they use certain modes. In-depth interviews with 22 Fl...

This study investigated the strategies which parents employ in order to mediate their adolescent child's internet use, thereby including the perspectives from the mother, the father and an adolescent child aged 13 to 18. Data from 357 families (n = 1071) were analyzed. Parental mediation strategies were inductively derived from a wide range of conc...

The vast majority of studies on parental mediation are quantitative by nature, which leads to a lack of in-depth understanding of how parents define and perform their role as socializing agents in this area. The present study offers new insights into how parental mediation is implemented on a daily basis with regard to adolescents' internet use. Th...

Parental knowledge about adolescents' activities is an identified protective factor in terms of adolescent adjustment. While research on parental knowledge has focused on adolescents' offline behavior, there is little empirical understanding of parental knowledge about adolescents' online behavior. This study investigates parental knowledge about a...

In onze geglobaliseerde samenleving is het de taak van iedere onderwijsinstelling om studenten internationale en interculturele competenties bij te brengen. Dit zijn immers competenties nodig op de (inter)nationale arbeidsmarkt. Deze studie onderzoekt aan de hand van evaluatievragen (i) de impact van een online internationaal groepswerk op de inter...

Users of social network sites (SNSs) use three main strategies that help to manage the privacy of their profile information: (1) limiting the level of data revealed, (2) using privacy settings to exert control over data and (3) audience/friendship management by being restrictive about whom to accept as a ‘friend’. Extant research does not show whet...

Social media revolve around self-disclosure. To present oneself, to start and expand one’s social circle, and to share content, a user has to disclose personal data. Self-disclosure, seen as the “process of making the self known to other persons” (Jourard & Lasakow, 1958, p. 91), helps people to find common ground to start and also to deepen (onlin...

Drawing on a survey conducted among 1,743 pupils in 16 (REMOVED FOR PEER REVIEW) secondary schools, this study applies an extended theory of planned behavior (TPB) to adolescents’ acceptance of friendship requests sent by online strangers on social network sites (SNSs). As demonstrated in the literature, random friending on social networking sites...

As one of the most recent forms of peer aggression, cyberbullying has emerged in our communities as a societal problem affecting the mental health of contemporary youth. As the prefix “cyber-” suggests, this type of bullying occurs through the use of an electronic medium. Following some widely covered cases in media (e.g. The Megan Meier story, the...

PhD Thesis defended at 29/09/2014

Sexting has received increasing scholarly and media attention. Especially, minors’ engagement in this behaviour is a source of concern. As adolescents are highly sensitive about their image among peers and prone to peer influence, the present study implemented the prototype willingness model in order to assess how perceptions of peers engaging in s...

Background: The non-medical use of stimulants for academic performance enhancement is becoming a more common practice among college and university students. Objective: The objective of this study is to gain a better understanding of students' intention to use stimulant medication for the purpose of enhancing their academic performance. Based on...

Sexting, het uitwisselen van zelfgeproduceerde seksueel getinte tekst- of beeldberichten door middel van ICT, brengt belangrijke risico’s voor de maker met zich mee en kan een impact hebben op het schoolklimaat. In deze bijdrage wordt besproken waarom jongeren aan sexting doen, wat de mogelijke gevolgen zijn en met welke risicogedragingen sexting g...

When a sexting message spreads to an unintended audience, it can adversely affect the victim’s reputation. Sexting incidents constitute a potential school safety risk. Just as with other types of adolescent risk behavior, school nurses might have to initiate the first response when a sexting episode arises, but a school nurse’s role goes beyond int...

This study examines the relationship between the level of trust that adolescents place in a specific commercial website and their behavioural intentions to disclose four categories of personal information (identity information, geographical information, profile information and contact information) to the website. Following the integrative model of...

The non-medical use of methylphenidate for cognitive enhancement becomes a more and more common practice among college and university students. Although physicians are a source of access, little is known about the underlying mechanisms that might lead to physicians' intention and behaviour of prescribing methylphenidate to improve students' academi...

This study aims to contribute to the research field on cyberbullying by offering a comprehensive theoretical framework that helps to predict adolescents' perpetration of cyberbullying. One thousand forty-two pupils from 12 to 18 years old in 30 different Belgian secondary schools participated in two surveys within a three-month interval. Structural...

The present study serves two purposes. First, we explore how adolescents and adults approach the disclosure of personal information and the application of privacy settings on social network sites (SNS). Second, we investigate whether the factors that predict these two privacy-management strategies differ for adolescents and adults. To achieve the g...

The present study aims at exploring which factors predict the willingness of adolescents to disclose personal information in response to online marketing requests. Our analyses show that especially privacy concerns and perceived benefits explain a considerable portion of variance in both willingness to disclose profile data (e.g. age, hobbies, favo...

The omnipresence of ICT in modern households has provided children and adolescents with plenty of opportunities for education, entertainment and contact. This young age group, however, is increasingly confronted with a range of online risks relating to personal contact and inappropriate content. This duality was the central thread of an internation...

Banners, virale marketing, advergames, brand pages zijn slechts enkele vormen van e-marketing waarmee jongeren geconfronteerd worden wanneer ze op het internet surfen. Maar welke zijn de mogelijkheden en beperkingen van online marketing om jonge consumenten te bereiken? Hoe kunnen minderjarigen beter beschermd worden door wetgeving en zelfregulerin...

Banners, marketing viral, advergames ou brand pages… Voici quelques exemples de pratiques d’e-marketing auxquels les jeunes sont confrontés lorsqu’ils surfent sur l’internet. Existe-t-il des limites à ne pas dépasser pour atteindre les jeunes en matière de marketing en ligne ? Comment peut-on garantir une meilleure protection des mineurs, par l’ado...

How do teenagers react when marketeers request personal data online? This is the central question of a survey conducted among 1,318 Belgian 12–18 year-olds. The present study reveals that despite a sceptical attitude towards online data collecting practices, teenagers are still prepared to disclose much personal information. The study discerns two...

The double-edged nature of modern technology, continuously balancing between risks and opportunities, manifests itself clearly in an emerging societal problem known as cyberbullying. To analyse the extent and nature of the issue in Belgium, 1318 adolescents were questioned explicitly about their involvement in cyberbullying, as well as implicitly a...

Het traditionele pesten heeft een nieuwe elektronische gedaante gekregen: cyberpesten. Kinderen en tieners gebruiken het internet en de gsm niet alleen om contacten te leggen en te onderhouden, maar soms wordt ICT ook ingezet om elkaar te pesten. Hoewel er nog veel onduidelijkheid bestaat over de precieze gevolgen hiervan op lange termijn, wordt...

Le harcèlement traditionnel connaît une nouvelle variante électronique : le cyberharcèlement. Les enfants et adolescents n’utilisent pas seulement Internet et les GSM pour entrer et rester en contact, certains utilisent également les technologies de l’information et de la communication (TIC) pour commettre des actes de harcèlement. Même s’il y a au...