Digital Values and Reported Online Practices Among Early Adolescents in Malta: Student and Professional Perspectives

Digital media are settings in which early adolescents negotiate privacy, respect, consent, responsibility and care. This focused mixed-methods secondary analysis brings together responses from 612 Year 8 students in Malta and interviews with 19 education and youth-support professionals. Students strongly endorsed privacy and respectful communication: 96.0% considered online privacy important, 90.3% agreed that they tried to communicate respectfully, 77.2% reported always or often seeking permission before sharing another person’s image, and 80.0% reported always or often checking information before sharing it. Responses were more varied for cyberbullying and screen-time self-regulation: 24.4% selected ignoring online bullying as their most representative response, and 22.4% were unsure whether they prevented screen time from interfering with important activities. Students’ open responses foregrounded kindness, non-harm, privacy, consent and reflection. Professionals highlighted peer belonging, visibility, social validation and reduced inhibition in adolescents’ digital environments. Bringing these perspectives together identifies common concerns alongside tensions between endorsed values, reported practices and the social settings of online interaction. The findings position digital citizenship as a relational dimension of applied values education and indicate directions for further student-centred research.