Funded by the National Centre for Research Methods, the project builds on the insights from the New Frontiers in Qualitative Longitudinal Research network and seminar series that was organised by CIRCY in 2013 and aims to develop and evaluate a range of methods for exploring the movement between face-to-face and online interactions.
Starting in September 2013, the project comprises two linked parts. The first extends family case studies developed as part of the ESRC-funded Making Modern Mothers research (2005-10) through which children - now eight years old - were followed from before birth. The original research team will re-visit five families and repeat methods originally piloted with adults: a 'day in a life' observation, 'favourite things' object-based interviews, and a 'recursive scrapbook'.
The second part of the research will run concurrently to establish a new panel of co-researchers aged 12-14 with whom the team will develop intensive, mobile methods for exploring movement between face-to-face and online interaction, combining ethnographic observation and widely available technologies for tracking and collating digital material. The research will focus on the ways in which families define interactions in temporal terms, for example 'play time', 'screen time', 'family time', 'homework', 'down-time', etc. and the transitions between these. Wherever possible, methods will be shared and adapted across the two parts of the study, facilitating the scaling-up of findings over time and space.
A key objective of the project is to work collaboratively with co-researchers and a media partner to see what kind of ethically sensitive, open-access documents of everyday childhoods-over-time it might be possible to create. These documents will be curated by participants for publication online generating a significant record of contemporary childhoods. In doing so, the project team will contribute to the development of ethical understandings in researching children's lives, informing critical debates concerning tensions within issues of child protection, and participation in researching childhood in a digital age.
To find out more about this project, contact
Liam Berriman, Research Assistant
E: L.J.Berriman@sussex.ac.uk
You may also be interested in CIRCY Director, Rachel Thomson's, professorial lecture (given 22nd January 2014) on Digital Childhoods which sets the project in a socio-historical context and gives examples of the multimedia outputs from the project so far:
