Currently in her fifth year of the program (All But Dissertation), and aiming to graduate in 2024, Cecilia Zhou’s research interests include Chinese digital parenting, adolescents’ media use and well-being, media literacy, and youth culture.
She was awarded the 2024 Suopis Communication Graduate Fellowship to support her dissertation entitled "Growing up in the Digital Age: Online Opportunities and Risks Among Urban Middle-class Chinese Adolescents". The dissertation examines Chinese adolescents’ use of digital technologies in home settings, shaped by Chinese parenting. Inspired by Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), the dissertation employs a blend of qualitative and quantitative methods, including in-depth interviews and surveys and incorporates adolescents’ voices in the design of the research materials, such as the interview guidelines and the survey questionnaire. It offers a culturally sensitive understanding of the digital experiences of Chinese youth, such as their negotiation of the tension between digital leisure and academic performance and contributes both empirically and theoretically to the body of literature on children’s digital rights and children’s digital lives in non-Western context.
The Suopis Communication Graduate Fellowship will help with another round of fieldwork in March and April 2024 for quantitative data collection and contribute to the summer writing period.
Cecilia expects to submit one article from the dissertation to a special issue in the Journal of Chinese Education & Society, and present part of the dissertation to the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference in England 2024.