Global research on children’s online experiences: addressing diversities and inequalities

This Method Guide examines the connections between knowledge production, power, inequality and exclusion in the production of international research about children and new or emerging media. Drawing on feminist and postcolonial debates about knowledge, it points to the existing inequalities between research and theory from the global North and the global South. How are issues of power and privilege embedded in a research process that claims universality? How is the focus on children’s internet use globally already underpinned by particular biases and exclusions? The Guide points to evidence that persistent social inequalities and vulnerabilities are transposed to mediated environments, and discusses the challenges of thinking about ‘children online’ when children are never an homogeneous group. Finally, it considers the best ways of ensuring that knowledge produced about the media use of children from discriminated and excluded groups across the world represents them fairly, and is useful to children in those groups.