Abstract:

Recent research identifies a gender violence increase on social networks among teenagers, specially highlighted during the COVID-19 (Becerra-Chauca and Taype-Rondan, 2020). TikTok has become the second most popular social network used by teenagers from 15 to 24 years old. It has acquired a significant influence in youth socialization processes. On TikTok, identities are usually configured as “showcase identities” (Tortajada et al., 2013) and modelled through a manufactured and artificial corporealization. In many cases, the content created and shared by teenagers is a projection of their own subjectivity, with gender and sexuality issues being the main axes of a representation that imitates patriarchal patterns (Khattab, 2019). This has created a dissociation between the real self and the virtual self, the vulnerability of youth to over-exposure on the web, and the proliferation of affective-sexual harassment that mainly affects young women (Instituto de las Mujeres, 2022).

Moreover, TikTok expresses new manifestations of gender violence in childhood and youth. For us, one of the great current educational challenges is to understand how the digital revolution shapes our students’ identities, roles, sex-gender stereotypes, and lives. This scenario has arisen some questions: How teenagers participate and represent themselves on TikTok? How does gender-based-violence manifest itself? What risks and opportunities are TikTok offering us as teacher educators?

The purposes of the study are:
(1) to explore how teenagers participate, represent themselves, and feel influenced by TikTok in their own processes of construction of gender identities;
(2) to identify and analyze the experiences, perceptions, and beliefs that young people have about gender violence on TikTok;
(3) to develop an educational guide for Teacher Education that promote responsible and critical participation in social networks.

The research takes place in three different stages. Firstly, we will design and distribute an online survey to a sample of 5,000 high-school students (14-16 years old) from 400 Spanish schools. Participants will be chosen through multi-stage stratified sampling based on data from the Ministry of Education. We will develop a Likert-scale questionnaire based on discussion groups and a pre-test that will help us to categorize participants’ perceptions, beliefs and experiences related to TikTok. We will also include open questions and we will compare and correlate the variables of gender, autonomous community, setting, and school type and complexity. Secondly, we will conduct a multi-stage stratified sampling to identify primary sampling units (autonomous communities) and secondary sampling units (school types/settings) using a proportional random approach. We have established a minimum sample of 5000 participants to achieve representativeness for each autonomous community and school type, with a precision error less of than 5% and a confidence interval of 95%. Thirdly, we will analyze all previous data and develop an educational guide for Teacher Education programs that will promote responsible and critical participation in social networks. This will help future teachers to act and to mediate in matters of gender violence in social networks, specifically on TikTok.

As the study is on its early phase, we are currently developing the framework. This is enlightening some resonant threads that will be part of the potential research results.

Keywords:

Gender violence, TikTok, education, Teacher Education.