This article investigates methodological and analytical implications of video-based techniques for conducting participant observations with children (6Á/8 years of age). Video-based data are used to illustrate arguments concerning how children use different interaction strategies while being observed with a video camera. It is also argued that visual recordings constitute a source of knowledge in their own right. Hence, a strong claim is made concerning the importance of researchers reflecting upon recording procedures. The article also offers a discussion of some methodological issues that play a crucial role in video recording young children's peer interactions. The article emphasizes the need to attend to and reflect on all components of the research process, including procedures for data collection and visual analysis, as well as how the visual material is reproduced in the written text. Qualitative Research in Psychology 2005; 2: 241 Á/255
The visual documentation of education for pedagogical purposes focuses on preschool children's activities and is used by educators to improve their understanding of children while strengthening their own professionalism. By analysing three educational TV programmes concerning visual documentation in preschools, this paper challenges the positivistic way visual documentation is portrayed. Moreover, it questions political documents and the TV programmes' unproblematic description of children as always ready to be visually documented. Applying a child perspective and children's perspectives, the paper demonstrates that there is a fine line between being documented and surveilled using visual technologies. The paper describes how doing on-looking-ness (onlooker) versus being looked-at-ness (looked at) can be understood as specific discursive formations.
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand, from children's perspectives, the commercial marketing strategy of selling breakfast cereals with “insert toys” targeted at children.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on four focus group interviews conducted with 16 children (8‐9 years of age) concerning 18 different breakfast cereal packages. The theoretical framework integrates childhood sociology, critical discourse analysis and talk‐in‐interaction. This theoretical and methodological combination is used to show how children, in local micro settings of talk, make use of the discourses that are available to them to produce and reproduce social and cultural values about marketing with “insert toys”.FindingsThe present findings suggest that, from children's perspectives, “insert toys” are constituted by cultural and social patterns extending far beyond the “insert toy” itself. For example, the analysis shows that it is not biological age that defines what and how consumption is understood.Research limitations/implicationsThe focus group material provides understandings of marketing strategies and consumption practices from children's perspectives. When the children talk about children and adults, hybrid agents of the “child‐adult”, the “adult‐child” and the “childish child” are constructed. These hybrids contradict research that dichotomizes children and adults likewise children's understandings of consumption based on age stages. Accordingly, age is rationalized into an empirically investigated category rather than being used as a preset category set out to explain children's behaviours.Originality/valueAnalysis of the focus group interactions shows that the way the market and marketing as well as children and adults are talked about is crucial to understanding children's and parents' actions as consumers.
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