Ethnographic Methods to Analyze Children’s Appropriation of Media Within the Kindergarten

Abstract

Communication media are omnipresent in children’s everyday lives. The children are surrounded by books, telephones, television and computers. Even computers with special software for early learning are increasingly finding their way into kindergarten and playschool. Therefore, a large amount of children’s engagements with media, their formats and their contents, as well as children’s social negotiation of media-related meaning takes place within the kindergarten. In kindergarten children interact within multiple frames of reference – both with peers and with adults. The article therefore proposes an ethnographic approach focussing on media in order to understand and study the children’s everyday world and the meanings they attribute to specific media, their formats and contents.The study of children’s appropriation of media is a methodological challenge that should not be underestimated. Therefore the article suggests adapting existing methods, which are usually employed when researching adults, to the specific research context with children. The article shows why media ethnographic studies that use methodological triangulation are particularly suitable for the research field of the kindergarten and for a range of research topics in preschool children’s media appropriation. Further, different methods of data collection, processing and evaluation are presented. Their usefulness in the research field kindergarten is discussed in relation to some empirical examples.