The Children's Music Quotient: Quantifying the Childness of Music Recordings Made for Children

Abstract

This article describes the Children's Music Quotient (CMQ), a method of content analysis that aims to quantify the concept of childness developed by Peter Hollindale in Signs of Childness in Children's Literature and apply it to the study of recordings of music made for children. It outlines the development of the CMQ and demonstrates the kinds of findings it can generate through case studies based on a broad range of children's music recordings. The analysis of attributes within three categories of the recordings (music, lyrics and sonics) is used to support wider arguments about discourses of childhood in specific socio-historical examples. An evaluation of the method highlights its adaptability for the quantitative analysis of other children's media, such as books, films, television shows and computer games