Creating and Regulating Identity in Online Spaces:

Adolescent Female Users’ Avatar Creation in Social Virtual Worlds: Opportunities and Challenges

“…Here, teenage girls learn and try to achieve peer standards of beauty, often featured by "flawless" skin and body, which are validated by peers through feedback mechanisms such as likes and follows on the platform [13,16]. Gendered norms of self-presentation seem to persist within digital spaces [6,13], potentially causing girls to shape their selfexpression to conform to social expectations [27].…”

Re-Imagining Sexual Harassment

“…While listening to them and many other participants talk about sexual insults and harassment, one key way of coping seemed to be peer solidarity, both in real life and online. Ruska and Nakki's knowledge about open resistance, confrontation and talking back stemmed from many digital feminist platforms on Tumblr and Instagram that they followed frequently (see Morrison, 2016) Furthermore, peer solidarity stemmed from a shared understanding of the perpetrator being almost always an adult male and thus urban sexual harassment as being intergenerational. Rakel pondered on the age of the perpetrator as follows: "Guys my age have never come to harass me".…”

Online Communication Settings and the Qualitative Research Process: Acclimating Students and Novice Researchers

“…This suggests that through virtual experimentation, young people can explore the boundaries of their own sense of self by deploying avatars. Users' construction of avatars-through gender, race, and across species designations-are somewhat out of their control because of what the developers of these products deem as an option (Morrison, 2016).…”

“…This said, the baseline definition of this technological “space” situates “online,” “mediated,” and “digital” as synonymous with the development of each new platform (Caliandro, 2017; Murthy, 2008). It is therefore not surprising that human interaction mediated through these platforms has become a locus where qualitative research and digital methods need to be adapted (Morrison, 2016; Reich, 2015; Underberg, 2006). Not only has access to evolving technologies broadened the scope of the field for social science research, but it has also provided availability to large amounts of data that have drastically changed the methods and tools employed to extract relevant information, and to some extent, what is considered qualitative methodology.…”