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The purpose of this paper is to explore how children can be empowered in the research process, as active agents and key informants, in matters affecting their consumption.

Insights are drawn from a study that used multiple methods to explore children's everyday food consumption practices. The data set was gathered over a period of two years and included: 23 informant‐generated visual diaries; seven online depth interviews; 15 school‐based depth interviews; 42 days of school‐based mealtime observations; and home‐based mealtime observations with four families, each visited on five different occasions.

The paper uncovers how visual diaries can be used in combination with other methods to transform relationships between adults and children in the research encounter. The emergent transformations are organised around three core themes that include: children's authentic voices; multiplex reality; and power and control. It was also found that children were able to express their own interpretations and thoughts about their food consumption practices, rather than solely relying on the adult interpretations of their lives.

For scholars and practitioners, the paper offers an approach that provides an opportunity for children to participate in family food decision‐making processes. It offers a cautionary tale not just about getting children to talk, but to allow children's voices to be heard in food policy initiatives, as well as in qualitative research and marketing. This poses a challenge to social researchers to think of different ways of engaging children in research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the introduction of auditory sensory cues, through a human voice, affect children’s and parent’s shopping behaviour in a retail grocery setting. In the field of retailing and sensory marketing research, there is a paucity of knowledge on how auditory sensory cues impact on consumers’ shopping behaviour.

The empirical study was a field experiment and entailed direct observation of shoppers of the Swedish grocery retailer ICA. The observations were based on a convenience sample of shopping families assigned to a control group (n=200) and an experimental group (n=131). A new innovative Swedish audio story track system was to be tested in a hypermarket containing 13 different stories for children.

Auditory sensory cues affect children’s and parent’s shopping behaviour in a significant way. Children are quieter, more relaxed and do not move around and reduce the parental stress behaviour during the shopping process.

The findings demonstrate that auditory sensory cues through human voice have a positive effect on children’s and parent’s shopping behaviour. It is also obvious that parent’s perceived stress is significantly influenced by the children.

The study provides guidelines for grocery retailers who wish to offer children and their parents a more pleasant shopping trip by emphasizing the role of the children.

The research demonstrates that the introduction of auditory sensory cues through human voice in a significant way affect the children’s and their parent’s shopping behaviour in a retail setting.

This paper assesses the ability of the minimally verbal child with autism to recognise their own voice. The rationale for this study rests in recent advances in technology aimed at making the voice of speech generating devices (SGDs) sound more like the child using them (van Santen and Black, 2009). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the child’s ability to actually recognise the sound of their own voice in a series of short experiments using computer-based methodology.

Using a voice-face matching computerised paradigm, the performance of 33 children with autism was compared to that of 27 children with developmental delay (DD), and 33 typically developing (TD) children. The children were matched for verbal and non-verbal ability and a training period was conducted prior to the main test to ensure children’s understanding of what was expected of them.

The findings of this study suggest that the child with autism recognise the sound of their own voice at test, but with much greater difficulty than age-and-ability matched comparison groups. The implications of this finding are useful for researchers in the field of speech mimicry technology and manufacturers of SGD software packages. The paper also provides empirical insights about how the child with autism may process voice in their everyday social interactions.

Some limitations to this study exist, for instance, there were only a small number of presentations involving self-voice in this task. This may have over simplified the process for the young TD children and the children with DD. Nevertheless, it is striking that despite being matched for non-verbal mental age, the children with autism performed significantly less well than either of the other two groups of children. However, future studies would benefit from adjusting the number of presentations of voice and face accordingly. It is also important to note that for some children with autism the simultaneous presentation of faces and voices may act more as an interference effect (Cook and Wilding, 1997; Joassin et al., 2004) than a facilitation effect (Molholm et al., 2002). Future studies may wish to test a subgroup on voice recognition without the aid of visual prompts.

The paper includes implications for the type of voice children with autism may prefer to use when communicating via a SGD. The authors suggest that if the child does not recognise or prefer the sound of their own natural voice on such devices, partial or complete abandonment of the SGD may occur.

This paper fulfils an identified need to research how children’s abilities and preferences can be taken into account at the point of decision making for particular communication tools.

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 examine the complexity of children’s involvement in school bullying from the child’s perspective.

A Foucauldian perspective provides a more nuanced approach than traditional understandings for examining the fluidity of power which involves “grey” areas; struggles between pupils, and pupils and teachers; and takes into account systemic factors. Data are drawn from observations, focus groups and individual interviews with children aged 10-16.

Children explained how pupils, teachers and inequalities inherent in school contributed to their involvement. Children felt coerced into reinforcing societal inequalities whereby the “vulnerable” were susceptible to victimisation and pupils can achieve status through bullying. Several working-class males who had learning difficulties felt “picked on” by their peers and teachers, and subsequently retaliated aggressively.

Findings from this relatively small sample provide insight into children’s unique experiences and how they are produced within wider systems of knowledge which differ from traditionally accepted discourses.

Pupils should have an input into the development and implementation of institutional strategies to tackle bullying.

Traditional ways of identifying “bullies” can be used to target those already marginalised whilst more sophisticated bullying is usually accepted and approved.

The complexity, fluidity and multi-faceted nature of children’s involvement is highlighted. Children discussed the maltreatment they experienced from pupils and teachers but did not realise how they may have subjected them to bullying.

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.

This study aims to explore young children’s information practices within the context of their individual interests, examining children’s interest-related information activities, challenges encountered and enablers received.

Participants included 18 children between five and seven years of age and their parents. Data were collected using a multi-stage participatory approach. Children shared their experiences via a book discussion, poster activity, participant-generated photography and a photo-elicitation interview. Parents provided information about family demographics and their perceptions of their children’s individual interests, information practices and digital media use via questionnaires. Data were analyzed using the constant comparative method.

Young children seek information via print and digital objects, other people and experiences, and use information by applying it to their activities and sharing information with others. Challenges to information activities include children’s own capabilities and skills, constraints of information sources and parental restrictions on their activities. Enablers include affordances of technology and parental support.

This study takes a holistic approach to understanding young children’s perspectives of their information activities, examining information use and sharing activities in addition to information seeking.

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the research methodology literature that arose out of the (new) sociology of childhood and the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (1989) with regard to conducting ethical research with children rather than on children. In particular, this article reflects on the development of a method (learning dialogues).

Learning dialogues were designed to enable children to share their responses to prompts about specific aspects of their lifeworlds. This was one method used to produce the data corpus which also included a large-scale survey, classroom ethnographies and (video) re-enactments of children's lives after school.

The piloting of the learning dialogues took place in several iterations and a particular form was used for the main study. The original idea and development of the learning dialogues highlights they were both a rich source of data that complemented the other data sources in the study and an activity that children indicated that they enjoyed. The authors discuss the practicalities involved with adapting a qualitative method to different settings and to projects with large numbers of children.

The conceptualisation of the learning dialogues as sources of personal documentation about aspects of children's lifeworlds was unique to this research. In thinking about the learning dialogues as one source of data within a broader project, the research aimed to be more inclusive of all participants in contributing to the findings produced in the project.

The recognition of children and young people as active agents, not merely passive subjects, has become a cornerstone of much research undertaken in the social sciences over the last three decades. Reflecting on research with young carers, this paper describes the research techniques employed to actively engage these children and young people in order to gain insight into their experiences of providing care. It concludes with a discussion of the benefits and disadvantages of the research methods, and the issues of ethics and consent.