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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.

Reports research into the sexual behaviour of UK teenagers at the margins of society, the project was a response to the Social Exclusion Unit’s brief to reduce the rate of teenage conceptions and to move teenage parents into education, training or employment. Focuses on the issues of recruiting teenagers for interview, methodology, and building trusting two‐way relationships with them so that sensitive subjects like condom use could be discussed. Characterises these teenage parents and their social status, and compares the UK with the rest of Europe: the former has a simultaneously puritanical and prurient culture. Finds that pairs of friends provided an open and honest environment for research, while journals and cameras provided to the teenage respondents were an essential part of the project. Finds that for them sex is often spontaneous, accompanied by alcohol, and invariably unprotected.

Recommending suitable content for users of online health communities (OHCs) is critical for overcoming information overload problem and facilitate medical decision making, but remains not fully investigated. This study aims to provide a content recommendation approach to automatically match valuable health-related information for OHC members.

A framework of health-related content recommendation was proposed by leveraging rich social information in online communities. The authors constructed user influence relationship (UIR) utilizing users' interaction records, user profiles and user-generated content. The initial user rating matrix and the user post matching matrix were then created by analyzing text content of posts. Finally, the user rating matrix and the recommended content were generated for community members. Datasets were collected from an OHC to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

The experimental results revealed that the proposed method statistically outperformed baseline models in content recommendation for users of OHCs.

The incorporation of social information can significantly enhance the performance of content recommendation in OHCs. The user post matching degree based on text analysis can improve the effectiveness of recommendation.

This study potentially contributes to the social support exchange and medical decision making of community members and the sustainable prosperity of OHCs.

This study proposes a novel social content recommendation method for online health consumers based on UIRs by leveraging social information in OHCs. The results indicate the significance of social information in content recommendation of healthcare social media.

The Independent Television Commission (ITC) regulates all commercial television in the UK, with the exception of S4C in Wales. Where the younger audience is concerned, it has a special duty to ensure that “material unsuitable for children must not be broadcast at times when large numbers of children may be expected to be watching”.

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on a novel multi-modal enabling technique for contextualising brand consumption experiences.

A multi-modal interpretive narrative approach is presented as a means of investigating brands as experiential entities for use in consumer identity projects. It reports the strategic use of different modes of data collection: autobiographical narratives generated by solo participants to create a benchmark of identity and subsequent friendship pair guided discussion interviews. This offers a faster, cheaper and more convenient means of gaining access to consumer experiences of brands than traditional ethnographic methods, which require prolonged engagements within a community.

Consumer narratives of actual brand consumption and of mediated brand consumption are enhanced using this method. The consumer narratives generated provided rich insights into the role of brands in contributing to national identity. The contextualised use and function of identity narratives provided by brands were identified in addition to the identification of national community rituals of consumption.

The multi-modal use of friendship pair interviews with solo autobiographical interviews is shown to offer benefits to qualitative consumer researchers focussing on brand/identity issues. The combination of data collection methods allowed for greater reflexive, memorial and contextualised discussion in the friendship pair interviews about brand narrative consumption and generated responses that advance beyond socio-political conventions concerning brands. Consequently, contextualised brand consumption experiences can be accessed more effectively than in conventional depth interviews.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the meso-level social forces that influence moderate drinking in young women’s friendship groups through the application of social capital theory.

A qualitative inquiry was undertaken utilising peer-paired and small focus groups to explore young women’s drinking choices within their existing friendship groups. Guided by emic and etic perspectives, friendship groups were analysed to inform archetypical representations that illustrate group-level social capital exchanges.

The approach led to identifying four social capital and drinking archetypes. These archetypes indicate social capital-led “influencers” and “followers” and highlight the displays of capital practised by young women in alcohol consumption contexts.

The social marketing insight drawn from this study of young women’s drinking behaviours will inform social marketers on future strategic directions about how they can use alternative methods to segment the social market of young female drinkers and develop value propositions that will motivate them towards adopting or maintaining moderate drinking practices.

This study contributes to social marketing theory by demonstrating the worth of social capital theory as an alternative lens for social marketers to apply in explorations of group influences that shape behaviour. The research findings in the paper demonstrate how deeper theorisation provides rich insight into the meso-level, complex behavioural influence which effect young women’s alcohol consumption.

The purpose of this paper is to study the influence of user personality and vlaues on the number of connections users make, the number of requests for connections that users give out, and the number of connections invitations users receive.

This is a field study of 179 participants interacting in a novel virtual world. The world’s server logs are used to capture sociometrics about the users and their interaction.

Findings suggest that personality and values influence the number of friends users make and the number of friendship requests users give out, but not the number of friendship invitations users receive. Only one personality trait – conscientiousness – exhibits homophily.

Perosnality and social value orientation have rarely been studied together in information systems (IS) research, despite research showing the two have an impact on IS relevant constructs. The use of server logs for data capture is novel. Avatar friendship is an under-researched concept in IS.

Investigates whether the performance and attitudes of students could be improved by giving them some control over the group selection process. Groups were formed either by randomly combining paired friends or by randomly assigning all students. Students completed a group exercise and a group case. The dependent variables were the project grades and student satisfaction. Student satisfaction was measured using a questionnaire. The results show that attitudes of students were more positive when they were allowed to choose a single friend in the group. The project grades were significantly higher when students were paired, and this result was true regardless of their grade point averages. The interaction between group selection and grade point average is explained, and the paper concludes that the best group selection is to pair friends and then combine them to form groups with high ability rather than randomly assigning students to groups.

This paper reviews the literature on unplanned purchasing and impulse purchasing in particular. Various definitions and explanations of the phenomena are examined. Because impulse purchasing may often be deemed socially undesirable, it is argued that a qualitative research approach is particularly appropriate in order to gain maximum insight. A study employing enabling techniques (including self scripts, laddering and pyramiding) demonstrated that interviewees were remarkably consistent in their descriptions of the impulse purchase experience. There were, however, variations of the behaviour which might form the basis of a classification scheme. Most studies have only focused on retail impulse buying. This study explored the subject across both retail and direct buying contexts.

This paper aims to investigate how social media usage by children determines their interactions with consumer brands. The paper also examines the nature of the processes evident.

A qualitative approach was implemented using both paired and single in-depth interviews of New Zealand children (both boys and girls) in the age group of 11-14 years. The data were analysed by thematic analysis of the interview transcripts.

The study demonstrates that children use three main processes – discerning, reacting and forming – when interacting with brands on social media. Each of these processes has different levels of interaction episodes depending on the amount of social media activity by each child. Discerning has noticing, a lower level of interaction and identifying which uses already internalised brand knowledge. Reacting consists of describing and evaluation which involves more active interaction resulting in opinion formation. Forming can involve a distant “watching” interaction or a more active relating behaviour when children are using multiple social media platforms.

The study identifies three key modes of brand interaction behaviour when young consumers use social media, which each have two interactions. The implication for marketers, parents and policymakers is that there is a range of behaviours, both passive and active, that children show when interacting with consumer brands when using social media.

The current study offers a way to deepen the understanding of how children approach online communications with brands in the social media context. The research finds that the children’s use of social media is more active and dynamic than previously thought, giving rise to connections with brands that are meaningful to the children. Specific codes of practice for online brand marketers may be necessary so that children are helped to understand the commercial intent of brand practices on social media.

The findings shed light on the range of interaction behaviour of young consumers, and such information provides insights into how children acquire brand knowledge, react to social media communication and decide the value of such communication for themselves. Brand marketers have a role to play in ensuring their brand communications practices avoid deception and clearly indicate commercial intent.

Investigating how children individually process brand information in a social media context provides insights into their interaction behaviour. These findings show differing levels of interest in both brand and social media activity amongst children.