Face 2 Face: Tracing the Real and the Mediated in Children’s Cultural Worlds (2013-14) was a 12-month methodological innovation project funded by the ESRC’s National Centre for Research Methods. The project grew from a NCRM Methodological Innovation network, lead by Professor Rachel Thomson, and was designed as a means of exploring issues of data sharing and re-use, and new ethical challenges around ownership, anonymity and privacy associated with digital technologies. The Face 2 Face study has documented children and young people’s everyday lives over time, paying attention to the ways in which new media technologies are infused into practices of sociality and relationships. The project has worked with two panels: a group of 8 year olds who are part of an established longitudinal study of new motherhood, who have been followed since before birth, and a newly established panel of 11-15 year olds. Using two key methods: a ‘favourite things’ interview and a ‘day in a life’ observation, the research team have been documenting young people’s lives generating multimedia records including digital sound recordings, photographs, ethnographic descriptions and screen capture and data logging.
The main output of the research is the creation of ethnically robust public documents of children’s everyday lives that demonstrate innovative ways of showing and sharing data generated by and with children and young people. These multimedia documents can be found on this website by visiting the ‘Case Studies’ section.
The themes developed in the Face 2 Face study are being developed further in the AHRC funded Curating Childhoods project, which enables us to follow these questions through into the domain of archiving and data sharing.
To find out more about the Face 2 Face project, please contact Dr. Liam Berriman.
