Search results

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate and discuss a number of child-centric research methods/stimuli involving young children (5-6 years old) in interviews without, and subsequently with their parents. Existing and new methods were selected and developed for a study which aimed at obtaining insights into parents’ and young children’s understandings of children’s influence and family interaction with regard to family food consumption practices.

A total of 35 children were interviewed using semi-structured interviews in five kindergartens. Subsequently, 13 families were interviewed in their homes. The latter interviews included the same children as were interviewed in the kindergarten. The methods discussed include drawings, a desert-island-choice task, a sentence completion task, photographs, vignettes and a video-clip.

When interviewing young children about family decision making influence, the use of engaging methods contributes to the quality of data achieved and to the participants’ enjoyment of their participation. Care should be taken not to overload children with exercises. Visual rather than verbal methods worked better for engaging the children in the research process; for parents all included methods worked well.

The current study shows that a method developed specifically for the study (desert-island-choice task) was apt at including all family members’ perspectives; future studies should develop methods that capture shared rather than individual experiences. The study was carried out in wealthy areas in Denmark. It would be highly relevant to broaden the sample to other socio-economic and cultural contexts.

The study is based on interviews with children usually deemed too young to interview. The contribution is novel methods that allow for studying the interaction between children and parents and that are not based on reading and writing skills to access the perspectives of 5-6-year old children. Precautions regarding using existing methods are offered.

We discuss the use of creative qualitative techniques for research studies focusing on young participants and encourage the development of what we term a “child‐centric” approach. We hope that by sharing our experiences we can help move forward the discussion of child‐centric approaches and methods, providing a useful starting point for researchers considering conducting qualitative research with children, and food for thought for those experienced at researching the lives of young consumers.

We begin our paper with a general overview of approaches to childhood as a social category, discuss methodological approaches to research with children and review the literature that informed our methodological approach. In the second part of the paper we focus on an empirical investigation, outlining a methodology with which we sought to embrace children's active participation. Our qualitative approach incorporates the following: quasi‐ethnographic methods; interviews; projective techniques and photography.

It is suggested that by shifting our research focus from a top‐down perspective into one that embraces childhood as a culture in its own right, we can greet children within their own language, using terminology they understand, and ultimately providing the context for a more fruitful and exciting data collection process. Our research design was effective in providing children with a voice with which to relate their experiences, and in this way we saw ourselves as facilitators, letting children tell us their own story in their own words.

We argue that it is only by recognising and taking on board some of the recommendations that have emerged from the debate concerning research with children that consumer researchers will discover a fuller appreciation of the participants we seek to understand. Lessons from this approach can also be fruitfully used to enhance the experiences of research involving participants other than children who should also benefit from more participant‐centred research designs.

This paper aims to offer both a practical and reflective stance on a longitudinal multi-method interpretive consumer research project carried out with tween girls.

This multi-layered approach to data collection, involving qualitative diaries, accompanied shopping trips, e-collages and in-depth interviews, addresses the need, as articulated by Morrow and Richards (1996, p. 96) to “move away from the narrow focus of socialization and child development” toward a research approach that prioritizes children’s own experiences of their lives as children, thereby reconsidering the richness of children’s voices.

In line with those whose work seeks to privilege children’s knowledge of the world they inhabit while also emphasizing the need, as in the case of adult “doing” to place that existence within its broader social context (Russell and Tyler, 2005, p. 227), diaries, in-depth interviews, shopping trips, e-collages and researcher diaries were used to access the world of these social neophytes as they mediate their social worlds through the ever pervasive prism of consumer culture. The light and shade of their worlds cannot be captured by adult-oriented perspectives on research which assume that young consumers are incompetent, worthy of debate merely to ascertain levelness of agency or of interest merely to quantify degrees of participation in and comprehension of the semiotic markers of our consumer society.

Only female consumers were involved in this study which underlines the need to engage with both genders when it comes to researching young consumers.

This paper offers a tangible contribution to the movement of research toward understanding young consumers’ worlds through engagement with multi-layered discourses and representations.

This multi-layered, multi-method research project acknowledges the enthralling complexity of these young consumers’ social worlds, giving a richness and immediacy to their accounts of the compelling intimacy between young adolescent identity and the marketplace.

The purpose of this paper is to offer some insight into how siblings aged between 4 and 12, engaged in a collaborative drawing activity at home, recall the shopping trips they have experienced.

Using a Vygotskian perspective, the data collection consisted of engaging 15 pairs of siblings in the production of a joint drawing of a shop of their choice. Drawing in pairs opens a Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1978) where the younger child benefits from verbal guidance by the older one to achieve the common task. This situation enables the researcher to gain close access to children’s knowledge about stores and to the words they use to describe their personal shopping experiences.

This exploratory research reveals some constitutive elements of children’s “shopscapes” (Nicol, 2014), i.e. the imaginary geographies they actively elaborate through their daily practices and experiences with regard to retail environments. In their communicative interactions when elaborating a joint drawing of the shop they have chosen, children demonstrate that they master a considerable body of knowledge about retail environments. Surprisingly, recalling their shopping practices sheds light on various anxiety-generating dimensions.

The data collection is based on a remembering exercise performed at home and does not bring information about what children actually do in retail environments. Moreover, the children were asked to focus on buying a present for a friend’s birthday, therefore the information gathered essentially relates to toy stores.

This research underlines the necessity for retailers to endeavour to reduce some of the anxious feelings depicted and verbalized by children, by improving the welcome for children into their stores.

There are also opportunities for retailers to invest in the consumption education area by guiding young visitors so that they learn how to behave as apprentice consumers in retail outlets.

The child-centric perspective of the study reveals new and surprising insights about the way children report their memorised shopping experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to explore children’s relationships with football teams and players and the influences on these.

A child-centric (Banister and Booth, 2005) inductive qualitative approach was utilised to capture children’s voices. The children were asked to take photographs around the theme of “football in my life” and these served as interview prompts when talking to friendship pairs.

Football played a central role in children’s lives in terms of interest, activity and consumption. The children articulated a portfolio of team (club) and player connections of varying strength. This contrasts with the existing adult fandom literature which focuses on individuals supporting a single team. Another strong theme emerging from the data was the children’s market-centred relationships with football clubs. Children’s connections were shaped by a complex web of influences including family and family history, friends, media and geography.

Existing fan literature has an adult focus which does not appear to fully explain the child fan. This research provides impetus for developing new theory that better captures child fandom. The findings reinforce the idea that football plays an important part in children’s lives and in doing so they establish their own meanings. The findings presented in this paper provide important insights into the lives of children that could be reflected on in the design of policy across a number of areas including education.

This paper presents the first child-centred football fan study.

French retailer, Système U, has triggered controversial debates among professionals and parents recently, by inserting images revolutionising gender norms in its Christmas toy catalogue. As children’s perceptions did not feature in these debates, the purpose of this paper is to explore their reactions to this catalogue, its gender-incongruent images and their associated toys.

An exploratory qualitative study was conducted with 27 children aged five to ten, from middle-upper social class. The methodology combined in one session participant observation, interview with visual stimuli and a collage exercise. First, each child was observed as they browsed freely through the catalogue, commenting it. Second, the interview focussed on four gender-incongruent images inside the catalogue to further explore reactions. Finally, they participated to a collage exercise on a mini-questionnaire, aiming at checking their gender-flexibility.

First, all children tend to focus on their own-gender pages only, as they have an intuitive understanding of the catalogue’s gendered structure. Second, incongruent images tend not to be noticed, with an exception being girls aged nine to ten. Third, the children’s acceptance of the gender-incongruent images is influenced by the gender-constancy stage, with the rigidity peak about gender norms at five to six; children’s own-gender-flexibility, between eight and ten; and the collective nature of the game.

This paper reveals children’s reactions to a toy catalogue containing gender-incongruent images. It provides new insights into how children notice, understand and appreciate these images and concludes with practical implications for retailers about how to better adapt catalogues.

The paper arose from an experienced qualitative market researcher's desire to challenge her working methodologies in analysing and interpreting data for commercial clients. Faced with tight deadlines, and working largely on her own, the researcher wished to consider if alternative working practices might be worth the necessary time investment and if outputs could actually be enhanced.

This paper compares the results of projective techniques of qualitative data collection analysed manually with computer‐aided analysis of the same data. Four focus groups were set up. Various creative and projective techniques were incorporated into the groups in order to explore and test the boundaries of both the manual and computer‐based analysis data to the full.

The organisation of data was aided by the use of CAQDAS file management structure, but a general overview of the results was somewhat lost to the researcher. Moreover, visual rather than textual data do not lend itself to computer‐aided analysis, minimising their utility in analysing results from a wide range of projective techniques.

While the objectivity of this introspective, reflective approach may be questionable, using a separate researcher to undertake different methods was neither deemed to enable a direct comparison of the process nor the experience, as seen reflectively through the eyes of the same researcher.

Insights can benefit other commercial market researchers who may be considering using CAQDAS.

The paper explores the analysis of data gathered using projective techniques – a recognised gap in the literature.

While recent academic research on entomophagy has predominantly focused on adults, the purpose of this child-centred research is to obtain a better understanding of young consumer acceptance of insect-based foods.

Two qualitative studies were conducted with a total of 43 French children aged 8–13 years. Study 1 (n = 22), based on semi-directive interviews, and Study 2 (n = 21), based on focus groups, included projective techniques and exposure to different types of insect-based products to help children express their feelings and thoughts.

The evidence shows that in Western children’s minds, insects are considered as culturally non-edible. Children predominantly reject insects as food because of their sensory properties and the disgust they arouse. However, their interest in eating insect-based food is embedded within experiential contexts specific to childhood, in particular the peer group, which makes insect-eating fun and challenging, and the family, which offers a protective and reassuring setting.

The authors advocate changing children’s sensory perception of insect-eating food through sensory and participatory activities. Manufacturers and policymakers should also draw on children’s peer culture to associate insect-eating with positive social experiences and foster peer influence.

Drawing on cognitive psychology theories and the literature in food science on food rejection, the authors contribute to emerging consumer research on alternative food consumption (AFC) focusing on cognitive, emotional and social factors of acceptance or rejection of insect-based foods by children.

The aim of this article is to explore children's understanding of television advertising intent.

A different perspective on advertising intent is offered in this paper, as evidenced in an interpretive study of Irish children, aged between seven and nine years. A qualitative approach was employed, involving a series of focus group discussions and in‐depth interviews with 52 children.

The findings indicate that the participating children view advertising as serving interests including, but not limited to, the advertiser. The existence of other interested parties is suggested by the children, namely the agendas of viewers and television channels. The authors assert that these children view advertising as being larger and more complex than the advertiser's perspective, which has been the traditional focus in the extant research.

Adopting an advertising literacy perspective, the authors seek to explore children's “reading” and understanding of advertising. Advertising literacy is an approach to understanding advertising that has not received substantial attention in the child‐advertising literature. The literature to date has tended to focus on the following question – do children understand the persuasive intent of advertising? This question is suggestive of a “yes/no” answer. In contrast, the authors view the concept of understanding as being more complex and multi‐faceted, and accordingly, seek to develop this concept by way of a classification that suggests four different levels of understanding that children may exhibit towards advertising

This paper aims to examine the perceptions of the visual packaging of snacks and nutrition knowledge among preschool children. Packages serve as persuasive media at the point of purchase.

In this paper 13 interviews with four-year-olds were conducted. Children sorted seven snacks that implied fruit into categories based on perceptions of fun, taste, parent’s choice and “nutrition”. Children also drew trees with food that would make them healthy or not healthy.

Children attended to the package elements more than the product. All children selected the character fruit snack as their preferred choice; however, perceptions for fun and taste varied among snacks. Perceptions of healthiness showed evidence of heuristics (e.g. sugar = bad; fruit = good). Some children were able to understand that their parents’ choices may be different from their own.

Because of the small sample size, it is not possible to generalize results to all children. Children seemed to understand that the character may not convey “healthy” or “taste”, but they still chose the snack with a character.

Children as young as four can understand nutrition heuristics and may/may not use those heuristics in product preferences.

Children may be able to reason about their own preferences and others’ preferences at a preoperational stage of development.

Previous research indicates that older children are attracted by characters. The findings show that younger children also prefer characters but may be capable of disentangling the various associations of “characters”.