Growing Up in the Online World – How Young People Engage with the Government Consultation on Social Media Use
What we will be doing
My name is Sarah Turner, Senior Research Fellow and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London (UCL). I will be your contact if you decide to participate.
This sheet explains the research and your potential involvement. I am happy to answer questions before you decide: you can contact me using my email address, which is at the bottom of this form.
About the research
The UK Government has released a public consultation on children’s social media use, open until 26 May 2026. This includes a survey for people aged 10–21.
This study examines how young people across this age range engage with that survey, with particular attention to whether the survey design supports or constrains meaningful participation. The study also compares the young people’s survey to the adult consultation and examines what questions young people were not asked.
What does participation involve?
One facilitated group session of approximately 90 minutes. You will:
- Work through selected questions from the government’s young people’s survey on a worksheet
- Discuss the survey’s design in a small group and as a whole group
- Look at questions from the full consultation that were not included in the children’s version
- Tell the researcher what you want included in a full consultation response
The session is facilitated by the researcher. You will not be asked about personal experiences in any depth. There are no right or wrong answers.
What are the benefits of taking part?
You will engage with a live government consultation, examining how the children’s survey is designed and comparing it with the adult version. The session develops skills in analysing survey methodology, particularly how question design constrains or enables participation. Your views will be incorporated into a full consultation response. You will also be contributing to academic research, policy papers and other public documentation on young people’s engagement with participatory policy processes. You can choose to be thanked in any published academic research, either with your real name or a pseudonym of your choice.
What are the potential downsides?
The session asks you to reflect on how the government engages with young people through consultation design. You may find it frustrating. Group discussion about social media may surface difficult topics. You are free to skip any question and can step back from the discussion at any time.
Your rights
- Participation is voluntary. You can withdraw from the session at any time without giving a reason.
- You can skip any question on the worksheet.
- You can withdraw your data up to one week after the session by contacting the researcher, although this will be on a best efforts basis as it is anonymised as soon as possible after the session.
- You can ask to see a summary of the findings once the research is complete.
Safeguarding and Confidentiality
Information shared will be kept confidential by the researcher unless it poses a safeguarding risk. However, as this is a group activity, the researcher cannot guarantee that other participants will keep what is discussed private. If something you share raises a safeguarding concern, the researcher will follow the safeguarding procedures of the setting you are in — your school’s procedures if you are a school-based participant, or UCL’s procedures if you are a university-based participant. In either case, this will also be reported to UCL if required.
How we handle your data
We will remove all names and other identifying information from the data we collect immediately after the session. This means the data will be anonymised.
- Please do not write your name on the worksheets. Scanned copies will be stored in secure UCL systems.
- The session will be audio recorded. The recording will be transcribed using either Microsoft Teams or using offline software and then deleted. The transcript will be stored in the same UCL folder as the worksheets.
- You will be described in research outputs as part of a group (e.g. ‘undergraduate students at a UK university’). You will not be named.
- If you fill in the consent form manually, it will be entered into the most secure system UCL has for storing data, and the paper form destroyed. If you fill it in online, the data goes directly into that same secure system.
Your data protection rights
- Under data protection law, you have the right to access the personal data held about you, to have inaccurate data corrected, and to request deletion of your data. Because worksheets are anonymised, it may not always be possible to identify your specific data after the week-long withdrawal window has passed. The lawful basis for processing personal data in this study is the performance of a task in the public interest (research). No special category data is collected.
- If you have any concerns about how your personal data is being handled, you can contact UCL’s Data Protection Officer at data-protection@ucl.ac.uk.
Formal Data Protection Privacy Notice
The controller for this project is University College London (UCL). The UCL Data Protection Officer provides oversight of UCL activities involving the processing of personal data and can be contacted at data-protection@ucl.ac.uk.
This ‘local’ privacy notice sets out the information that applies to this study. Further information on how UCL uses participant information from research studies can be found in the ‘general’ privacy notice at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/legal-services/privacy/ucl-general-research-participant-privacy-notice
The information required to be provided to participants under data protection legislation (GDPR and DPA 2018) is provided across both the ‘local’ and ‘general’ privacy notices. The lawful basis for processing personal data is ‘Public task.’ No special category data is collected from this participant group.
The personal data collected for this participant group includes: name, audio recording of group discussion (deleted after transcription), email address.
Personal data will be processed for as long as required for the research project. Where possible, personal data will be anonymised, and data processing will be minimised wherever possible.
Anyone with concerns about how personal data is being processed, or who would like to enquire about their rights, should contact UCL in the first instance at data-protection@ucl.ac.uk.
Sarah Turner – s.turner@ucl.ac.uk
Senior Research Fellow, UCL Knowledge Lab, 23–29 Emerald Street, London, WC1N 3QS
This project has been reviewed and approved by the UCL IOE Research Ethics Committee: REC2394.
Data protection registration number – No Z6364106/2026/03/183