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This article addresses the complexity of children's risk landscapes through an ethnography of 10-to 12-year-old Danish children. The data revealed how children individually and collectively engaged with risk in their everyday activities. The children assessed risks in relation to their perceptions of their health as strength and control, negotiated the conditions of playing, and attuned their responses to situations of potential social and physical conflict. In the paper this risk engagement is illustrated in a variety of contexts: children's decisions to wear or not to wear a bicycle helmet; playing and games and routine pushing and shoving at school. In looking after themselves, children negotiate rules of participation and they safeguard personal and collective interests. Gender differences in these processes are addressed and discussed. The article argues that risk engagement is an important resource through which children also learn from their own mistakes. This is a necessary learning process when children engage with their personal health and safety. The article critically discusses different sociological frameworks and shows the significance of the study for the growing literature on understanding the meaning of risk in childhood.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to contribute to studies of family decision making during food buying. In particular a theoretical framework is proposed for structuring future studies of family decision making that include children's influence and participation at specific stages of the process.Design/methodology/approachThe conceptual framework is developed on the basis of earlier theoretical work focused on family shopping as well as an ethnographic study of parents and children. The framework was refined after testing in a survey with 451 Danish families with children aged ten to 13 using questionnaires for both children and parents.FindingsFamily food decision making is often a joint activity, and children's active participation, among other things, determines the influence they gain. Parents and children do not always agree on how much influence children have in the various stages of the process, indicating the importance of listening to both parties in research into the family dynamics and processes involved in everyday food buying.Research limitations/implicationsFuture research should further extend the knowledge about the areas where children have influence, about the techniques used by children to achieve influence, and more about those factors that explain when they gain influence.Practical implicationsMarketers can benefit from the findings when promoting food products to adults as well as to children. Specifically, the findings suggest that children have most influence on decisions regarding easily prepared meals.Originality/valueThis mixed‐method approach provides interesting new results, and the main findings emphasise the importance of looking at food decision making as a joint activity where children participate actively and gain influence.

This article discusses the potentials of a mixed methods approach to the study of children's mobility patterns. The methodology presented here combined ethnographic fieldwork with global positioning system technology and an interactive questionnaire that children completed via mobile phone. This innovative methodology allowed the researchers to generate a rich understanding of children's everyday movements. The study combined documentation of children's subjective experiences with systematic observations, mapping, and survey data. The article sets out lessons learned for future mixed methods research into children's everyday mobility. One such lesson was that it required the interdisciplinary research team to cooperate closely through dialogue, support, and coordination of activities and perspectives. The approach also promoted the children's commitment to the study.