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C. J. Pascoe

Studying Young People’s New Media Use: Methodological Shifts and Educational Innovations

A lack of good information about what youth are doing with new media stimulates fears and hopes about the relationship between young people and digital technologies. This article focuses on new modes of inquiry into youth new media use, highlighting the challenges, complexities, and opportunities inherent in studying young people’s digital cultures. It outlines methodological issues unique to studies of youth and new media, such as accessing populations of respondents, benefits and drawbacks to online qualitative research, and challenges in capturing a snapshot of young people’s actual, not self-reported, media practices. This type of qualitative research on youth media cultures and practices can guide educators who are developing pedagogy and policy that

C. J. Pascoe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Colorado College. Correspondence should be addressed to C. J. Pascoe, Colorado College, Department of Sociology, 14 E. Cache la Poudre, Colorado Springs, CO 80903. E-mail: cejae74@gmail.com

integrate young people’s mediated practices into the educational process.

ONTEMPORARY YOUTH CULTURES have been shaped by, and are shaping, the use of new media. Parents, educators and those who work with youth are struggling to catch up with young peoples’ orientations, practices, and ideas about digital technology. These adult constituencies are simultaneously fearful of the effects new media have on youth and are eager to harness the power of digital technology for the learning process (Alvermann, 2004). Parents, for instance, want their children to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by new modes of communication while they also attempt to shield young people from known and unknown dangers lurking therein (Wang, Bianchi, & Raley, 2005). As such, schools and educators often impose restrictions on digital media use, fearing students’ mediated practices might impair the learning process or

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put them at risk of victimization. A lack of good information about what youth are actually doing with new media often stimulates these fears and hopes. This article suggests specific approaches through which researchers and practitioners might gather information about young peoples’ mediated practices. Armed with good information about these practices parents, educators and those who work with youth might be able to make decisions about how to incorporate, or not, new media into educational settings. Gathering data on young people’s technology use has proven somewhat challenging, given that emerging technologies can complicate traditional research methods (Hine, 2005). As a result, some research methodologies need to be rethought to incorporate mediated communication practices (Mallan, Singh, & Giardina, 2010; Standlee, Garcia, Bechkoff, & Cui, 2009). One of the most fruitful avenues of research into new media use is the use of new media itself as a tool of inquiry (Heath et al., 2009; Moinian, 2006). Researchers, for instance, are marshalling technologies like instant messaging for interviews or deploying mobile phones to replace pen-and-paper notes for diary studies. Using digital technology in these ways solves some of the problems researchers might encounter in conducting qualitative studies of young people’s new media use, as well as poses new ones. For example, using new media can expand the purview of traditional methods by transcending geographic limitations, facilitating access to populations of respondents that are not easily accessible, saving costs, and possibly allowing researchers to investigate sensitive topics that might be difficult to cover in offline environments (Heath, Brooks, Cleaver, & Ireland, 2009; Mann & Stewart, 2000). However, the process of researching young peoples’ new media use also raises structural, ethical, and methodological concerns. This article briefly discusses four modes of investigating young peoples’ new media practices: performing content analysis, conducting interviews, negotiating access, and carrying out ethnography. Using these techniques to gather information about how young people use technology in their everyday lives, practitioners might

Studying Young People’s New Media Use

be able to incorporate the “informal learning” (Ito et al., 2009, p. 65) that happens through technology use into formal pedagogy in effective ways that feel authentic to learners.

New Methods for New Media Gathering data on new media use requires some rethinking of qualitative methods. This rethinking can help to alleviate some of the current struggles qualitative researchers encounter when studying youth. Researchers often have difficulty accessing populations of youth to research naturalistically outside of an institutional setting. Ongoing contact with young people also poses a difficulty for the qualitative researcher. Research subjects under the age of 18 are, rightly so, considered by institutional review boards as a vulnerable population and require more stringent protections in research protocols.

Access Mediated environments such as social network sites, blogs, or bulletin boards allow researchers to contact youth outside of formal institutions. A researcher can send a young person a call for participation and he or she can post it on his or her wall or forward it to a group of friends, some of whom he or she may know intimately and some of whom he or she may know only tangentially. The Internet also provides a way for a young person to find a researcher. The researcher can advertise in a variety of online venues that young people visit, such as social network sites, bulletin boards, or blogs, especially if he or she is looking to target a population who may be interested in specific topics, activities, or identities. In these ways, new media allow researchers to circumvent institutional barriers that can serve as gatekeepers to young people. The same technology that helps researchers navigate around institutional barriers also provides youth a way to transcend restrictions on their mobility. Cell phones, instant messaging

Qualitative Research in the 21st Century

technology, and social network sites are all private lines of communication in which a particular youth can engage, even if that particular young person is bound to the home (because of curfews, lack of transportation, and the like). One researcher, for instance, reported spending an evening on IM with a 13-year-old respondent because she was not allowed to leave the house at night but was allowed to participate in an online interview (Ito et al., 2009). When thinking about issues of access, new media provides opportunities for researchers to navigate an age-graded society that often separates adults and children by providing new channels of communication.

Content Analysis A main problem researchers encounter when studying young people’s new media practices is that these technologies are so woven into the fabric of young people’s daily lives that they forget that they are actually using it. Fortunately, new media archives its own use, making invisible moments of use visible. In this sense, respondents’ computers, cell phones, Web browsers, and social network profiles can themselves be technological artifacts on which a researcher can perform content analysis. Although a researcher may not always be with a given respondent while he or she engages in technological practices, viewing these archives can bring to life those private and often forgotten moments. Mobile phones, for instance, are such a part of young people’s everyday lives that it is often difficult for a respondent to elaborate on its use. A researcher can use the phone itself as digital artifact, asking respondents to scroll through the information stored in their phones to provide insight into their communication practices (Horst & Miller, 2006). When looking at call logs, text messages, and photos stored in respondents’ phones, researchers can ask a series of questions about who the respondent called, what they talked about, who they were with during the call, and what they were doing when they received or made a call. Through asking these types of questions, a researcher can learn not just about

technological practice, but the context of that practice. A researcher might do something similar with an instant messaging program, by scrolling through archived discussions. In fact, at the beginning of a research project, a researcher might consider asking youth to begin archiving their instant messages so that he or she can ask about them in an interview. Because over half of American young people have a social network site presence (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010), these sites are also fruitful archives of young people’s social lives. On a given social network profile, a respondent may list his or her friends, have a record of wall posts, display videos, and the like. These sites can provide information about the way in which new media may or may not be a part of his or her social world. These sites can show the researcher what is important to a given respondent, allow the researcher to inquire as to specific events memorialized on these sites, and shed light on the relationships played out over such sites. In walking through a site with a respondent, an interviewer gets a story not just about the respondent’s life but about the role new media plays in it. The Web browser itself can be a glimpse into the often private world of new media use. Much like a researcher might request to see a respondent’s cell phone call logs, he or she might also ask to see a respondent’s browser history. Researchers can ask respondents to guide them through their favorite Web sites. The discussion around this history and the pages respondents visit can reveal much about a respondents’ daily use of the Internet. Interviews Digital communication technologies also enable new interviewing strategies. E-mail, instant messaging, texting, and Skype-like programs can all be used to facilitate interviews. These technologies allow researchers to modify traditional interview techniques by addressing challenges such as young people’s physical immobility, their distance from the interviewer, or the difficulty

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of accessing a dispersed population. There are some drawbacks to these types of mediated interviews. Although there are ways to convey affect in online environments (Kazmer & Xie, 2008), researchers may lose some of the physical, interpersonal interaction upon which interviewers rely to build rapport and craft the interview. However, there is some evidence that participants engage in higher levels of personal disclosure online (Joinson, 2005; Walther, 1996), which might mitigate the lack of physical cues. New media technologies can also be used to rework traditional diary studies. These studies provide a wealth of concrete detail that can get lost in more traditional forms of interviews. In one study, respondents were given a cell phone with a camera and asked to use it to document every time they used a piece of technology for a 48-hour period (Ito et al., 2009). Respondents sent a message to the researcher including a picture of the technology, a description of what they were doing with it, how long they did it, and who else was with them. Researchers followed each diary study with a face-to-face interview in which they discussed each diary item. These studies provide micro-level detail about how young people use technology in their daily lives that would have been difficult for researchers to access in any other way. Diary studies, quite simply, give researchers glimpses in to the private spaces to which they cannot go. This approach often helps in the endeavor of making the invisible visible, reminding respondents of those mundane moments of technology use about which they might have otherwise forgotten. Ethnography Ethnographic research methods are currently being expanded to include and address mediated venues (Robinson & Schulz, 2009). These online environments allow researchers to take advantage of the continuous contact and always-on (Baron, 2008) possibilities of new media. Instant messaging, text messages, social network site communication, and bulletin board posts all provide a form of constant contact that might be used as part of new media ethnography.

Studying Young People’s New Media Use

Instant messaging programs provide opportunities to engage in real time chats in an ongoing fashion. Both the researcher and respondent can remain in casual frequent contact in the same way they could if the researcher were doing participant observation in the respondent’s daily world. Text messages can work much the same way, and perhaps might be even a more fruitful research practice given the prominent role of text messaging in many young people’s lives. Although both instant messaging and text messages can be used to conduct formal interviews, ethnographically they can also function much like informal conversations in a physical research site. In fact, while researching young peoples’ technology use, I carried out some of my most interesting conversations with young people over instant messaging, long after the formal interview was over, as we chatted about daily life and current events or they shared stories they thought I might find interesting. Social network sites and message boards are online venues where researchers can hang out, much like they might in a physical research site. On social network sites, researchers can friend their respondents and see what they are doing online on a daily basis. These observations might also provide data to talk about in a following interview. Message boards provide a similar function, a window into youth social worlds that might not otherwise be available. It should be noted, however, that most institutional review boards are not yet equipped to review these online ethnographic techniques and researchers may have to educate their own institutions as to the ethics of these sorts of research practices.

New Challenges for New Media Using new media to study technology use can allow unprecedented access to youth and to intimate parts of young people’s lives. In many ways, this is a boon to social media researchers. However, these methods raise questions about methodological, ethical, and structural concerns.

Qualitative Research in the 21st Century

Methodologically, researchers need to be aware of the projection of adult use of new media on to young people’s practices and orientations. That is, adults cannot assume that youth use technology as adult designers intended or in the same way adults do. Adults, for instance, might assume there is a digital world and a real world, and that the former is inferior to the latter. For most youth, mediated practices are not some sort of alternative reality, but an extension of their everyday interactions (Mackay, 2005). Second, young people may use and view certain technological forms differently than adults do. E-mail, a mainstay of adult workplace communication and sociality, is used less frequently by young people, except in formal instances (such as contacting a professor) as they prefer to text or message on a social network site (Lenhart, Madden, Rankin Macgill, & Smith, 2007). Adult researchers need to keep in mind that young people might espouse different perspectives on these technologies than adults do (Cosaro, 1997). Third, adults often see the Internet as a dangerous space (Richman, 2007). Researchers need to be aware of their assumptions about safety and danger as they forge ahead in this area of research. Researching young people’s new media use also raises several ethical concerns. These mediated communication technologies challenge researchers’ ability to maintain a boundary between their public and private lives (Robinson & Schulz, 2009). The same technologies that circumvent adult guardians of youth may also transcend the researchers’ personal boundaries. For instance, researchers need to think seriously about whether or not to friend the youth they are researching. Doing so allows researchers ongoing contact with respondents, but also may allow respondents to learn private information about researchers. Similarly, researchers should consider whether or not to share mobile phone numbers. Such availability can, again, provide ongoing contact, but opens up a venue for potential abuse. It is not that these types of boundary transgressions do not appear in offline research

(Pascoe, 2007); new media use might facilitate such transgressions. Thus, researchers need to address how the very technology that has made it easier to access youth also comes with a new set of challenges regarding boundaries between the researcher and the researched. Ethically, it is also important to think about the presence of the fieldworker in deidentified online spaces. Does a researcher need to announce his or her presence in an online discussion group (Rutter, Smith, & Kollock, 2005)? If the group is a private one? If it is publically available? Some argue that lurking might be considered ethical; others claim that the researcher always needs to announce himself or herself (Robinson & Schulz, 2009). These ethical quandaries need to be addressed by institutional review boards where there is currently an “absence of ethical guidelines that specifically address Internet research” (Richman, 2007, p. 183). Although not specifically addressing youth, the Association of Internet Researchers is attempting to clarify research ethics of online research behavior that may be found on their Web site (Robinson & Schulz, 2009). Following suit, institutional review boards also need to address, more directly, the challenges that accompany qualitative research of new media and youth. These boards often work off the implicit assumption that youth are contained in certain institutions, but, as this article has demonstrated, these institutions may be rendered less salient due to new communication technologies. Online research raises questions of age verification, parental consent, and levels of contact. If researchers do solicit online participation, how is one supposed to verify a given respondent’s age? How do we know their parents are signing scanned consent forms? Indeed, one of the drawbacks of new media is that we cannot verify who people are (Heath et al., 2009). The level of contact between respondent and researcher might be much more frequent and less formal than in offline environments. Institutional review boards need to develop guidelines around ethical standards of qualitative online research with youth by attending to some of these unique challenges.

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Studying Young People’s New Media Use

New Practices With New Media New strategies of qualitative research are necessary to study youth new media use because, by knowing what young people are doing with technology, practitioners will be able to reframe the current discourse about technology use in educational settings. Rather than understanding new media as solely a threat to the educational process, practitioners reframe new media as an important part of what researchers call “informal learning” (Ito et al., 2009, p. 65). That is, as youth are texting, writing blogs, updating social network sites, or playing games, they are not just playing, but are actually engaging in a learning process (Ito et al., 2009). Upon first glance, this informal learning process may be clouded by the moral panic that often accompanies new technologies—thus the need for good qualitative research on young people’s practices. Building on the idea that young people learn through mediated practices, educators have begun to incorporate these practices into more formal educational processes. One of the more innovative examples of this approach might be the Quest to Learn public school in New York City, where the curriculum is centered around games and game-inspired methods (Salen, Torres, Wolozin, Rufo-Tepper, & Shapiro, 2010). Although reorienting an entire curriculum around a specific type of technological practice is not necessarily feasible or desirable for most schools, the idea that games may be an important learning tool is one that can be integrated on a smaller scale in particular classroom projects. As Katynka Martinez’s (2007) work demonstrates, games can be important in the development of literacy skills. Knowing how youth use new media as part of their everyday lives can help practitioners incorporate technology in ways that feel authentic to learners. However, practitioners must first know what young people are doing in mediated environments. Knowing, for instance, that some young people spend their free time writing fanfiction as a member of an online community, or dedicate evenings to writing long, involved role plays with peers across the world (Ito et al., 2009), might inspire teachers to think in new

and creative ways about how to get students to think about the writing process as one that can be fun, collaborative, and peer oriented. Practitioners looking to integrate new media into their pedagogy in ways that reflect young people’s informal use can draw on findings presented in the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative and the book Teaching Tech Savvy Kids (Parker, 2010). Both of these draw on qualitative research studies of young people’s new media use to develop suggestions for ways educators might use technology in their pedagogy. By drawing on this type of research, rather than banning sites that deal with particular topics, social network or blogging sites, schools and administrators might use data on youth new media cultures to develop thoughtful and measured strategies that keep youth safe while integrating these new communication technologies in classroom settings in ways that feel authentic for young people.

Conclusion Much of the discussion around youth and new media use frames technology as a threat to learning: Youth are texting during class. Youth no longer have a sufficient attention span. Youth have lost the ability to write because texting has replaced real English for them. Qualitative research of youth new media use can place these fears in context, rather than letting them drive educational practice regarding technology. Studying youth is no easy task for a variety of reasons—access, ethical concerns, and the contemporary understandings of age. Studying their new media use both solves and throws into relief some of these issues. Using new media to research young people’s technology use can help researchers circumvent institutional barriers, keep tabs on youth, chronicle easily forgettable behavior, and provide, in many ways, documentation of young people’s daily lives. However, it also comes with its own set of challenges— lack of IRB understanding, adult preconceptions about new media, and a lack of clear ethical guidelines.

Qualitative Research in the 21st Century

In spite of these obstacles, performing research on youth media cultures and practices can help educators develop pedagogy that integrates young people’s mediated worlds. By knowing how, when, what, where, and with whom youth use technology, practitioners can note the ways in which media actually does interfere with the learning process (not just ways they fear it does) and devise creative ways to integrate media into the learning process.

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