Adults Lived Experience of Opportunities and Threats of Cyberspace: A Qualitative Study

Cyberspace, by creating new frontiers in social communication, has created opportunities and threats for human beings. Leading research aims to identify adults' lived experiences of opportunities and threats posed by cyberspace activities. For this purpose, using Purposeful sampling of the type criterion sampling 22 email interviews with open-end questions received. The adults answered the questions in four separate clusters. For accurate data analysis The MAXQDA version 12 was used. In order to increase reliability, verifiability, and credibility of data accuracy, the methods of "inspection and review at the time of coding", "benefiting the opinions of research colleagues and getting their aproval", explaining the exact details of the data collection and analysis process", long-term involvment and triangulation were used. In the partofCyberspace Opportunities and in the family cluster, child or student and community, respectively,  “awareness of the daily news and facilitating family affairs", using daily news  increasing socialization level, and convergence with friends and "cost reduction", were identified as the most important themes. . In the component of cyberspace threats, almost all of the themes had the same weight in terms of repetition and only in both individual and family clusters, the repetition of codes related to the "waste of time" theme has been frequent. The results showed that despite the numerous opportunities of cyberspace, due to the lack of appropriate and adequate education, the threats posed by cyberspace are becoming more visible and effective and the need for comprehensive media literacy training and management of this space is felt more than ever.