Youth Internet Safety Scale (Finkelhor, Mitchell, & Wolak, 2000)

• Populations: Children, Adolescents; American 7th grade students
• Age ranges: 10-17
• Languages: English
• Countries: United States

Items

• In the past year, did you ever feel worried or threatened because someone was bothering or harassing you online?
• In the past year, did anyone ever use the internet to threaten or embarrass you by posting or sending messages about you for other people to see?
• In the past year, when you were doing an online search or surfing the web, did you ever find yourself in a web site that showed pictures of naked people or of people having sex when you did not want to be in that kind of site?
• In the past year, did you ever receive E-mail or Instant Messages that you did not want with advertisements for or links to X-rated web sites?
  
  • Did you ever open a message or a link in a message that showed you actual pictures of naked people or people having sex that you did not want?
• In the past year, when you were online, did you ever find people talking about sex in a place or time when you did not want this kind of talk?
• In the past year, did anyone on the interenet ask you for sexual information about yourself when you did not want to answer such questions?  I mean very personal questions, like what your body looks like or sexual things you have done.
• In the past year, did anyone on the internet ever ask you to do something sexual that you did not want to do?
• In the past year, did anyone on the internet ever ask you or encourage you to runaway from home?

Originally used as interview screener questions, these items have also been used in survey form by Cutbush & Williams (2016)

Scoring

“Response options for each of the items within each scale were coded dichotomously: never (0), any (1).” (Cutbush & Williams, 2016)

Citations

Finkelhor, D., Mitchell, K. J., & Wolak, J. (2000). Online victimization: A report on the nation’s youth. Alexandria, VA: National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Retrieved from http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/pdf/Victimization_Online_Survey.pdf

Cutbush, S., & Williams, J. (2016). Teen Dating Violence, Sexual Harassment, and Bullying Among Middle School Youth: Examining Measurement Invariance by Gender. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 26(4), 918–926. https://doi.org/10.1111/jora.12244