Researching Social Media with Children

Reflecting on the methodological issues involved in researching digital spaces with children, this book shares good practices and delves into the ethics of such research.

Social media has completely redefined how children and young people relate to each other, express themselves, and present their identities and sexualities. Yet researching social media can be a difficult and daunting task given the ephemerality of the content, its contextual hyperspecificity, the complex power relationships between users, celebrity culture, digital capitalism, and the ethical issues that arise from the reimagining of the public/private space. Using digital ethnography and creative digital storytelling workshops with children and young people aged 13-15 and 13-18 on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitch, this book studies their interactions, language, codes, the risks they take, and the victimizations they suffer.

Researching Social Media with Children will be of use to social scientists conducting online research, and to students and scholars of media studies, digital criminology, psychology, and sociology.

[The authors draw on experiences from studies carried out in Spain on children and social media by the Knowledge-Research Group on Social Problems at Universidad Europea de Madrid.]