Navigating the moral landscapes in research into children’s digital lives: Reflections from Türkiye and the United Kingdom

Abstract

Objective: This paper offers methodological reflections on the ethical challenges of researching children’s everyday lives in a digital context, drawing on two studies conducted in different international contexts: the United Kingdom (Everyday Childhoods) and Türkiye (Children’s Individual Privacy at Home and in Digital Environments). Method: Both studies were qualitative and ethnographic in character, concerned with understanding how we can study the digital lives of children in situ – within family relationships, educational settings and the social/leisure worlds of young people. Results and Conclusion: In exploring children’s digital lives across these different spaces, we encountered numerous challenges and tensions that shaped the possibilities of making children’s digital lives researchable. In particular, our work involved navigating moral concerns of what might be considered ‘healthy’, ‘educational’ and ‘appropriate’ digital practices by adults in children’s lives, and children’s concerns of having their digital lives researched by adults. By bringing findings from these studies into conversation with each other, we seek to draw out some of the key learnings about the challenges of researching this increasingly prominent aspect of children’s everyday lives as a moral landscape. By taking two studies from different international contexts, we also consider how dialogues between the studies can generate insights into the particular politics of researching children’s digital lives within particular places and cultures.