Digital Media and Secondary Education Students: Inclusion or Exclusion?

Abstract

Inclusion of students with marginalization tendencies has been one of the demands in the field of education over the last decades, but it remains unrealized. At the same time, our daily lives appear to have changed rapidly because of extensive use of digital media. This fact may have both positive and negative consequences. So, we were inspired to investigate the relationship between teenagers who may be marginalized and the use of digital media, as well as the degree to which they promote or prevent inclusion, by the foregoing considerations. We chose mixed methodological approach as the most appropriate. Specifically, sequential exploratory strategy was used to collect the data, while grounded theory was used for their analysis. The quantitative part sample consists of 600 Secondary Education students. Accordingly, the sample of the qualitative part of the research was 138 Secondary Education students. The survey was conducted over a period of three months (from October 2019 to December 2019). By completing the research project, we concluded that the use of digital media and especially the engagement of adolescent students who show marginalizing tendencies with social media, digital games and distance education leads to their inclusion.