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Theory Into Practice

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Studying Young People's New Media Use:

Methodological Shifts and Educational
Innovations
C. J. Pascoe

Department of Sociology , Colorado College

Published online: 05 Apr 2012.
To cite this article: C. J. Pascoe (2012) Studying Young People's New Media Use: Methodological Shifts
and Educational Innovations, Theory Into Practice, 51:2, 76-82, DOI: 10.1080/00405841.2012.662862
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2012.662862

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Theory Into Practice, 51:7682, 2012

Copyright The College of Education and Human Ecology, The Ohio State University
ISSN: 0040-5841 print/1543-0421 online
DOI: 10.1080/00405841.2012.662862

Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 11:47 07 January 2014

C. J. Pascoe

Studying Young Peoples 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 peoples
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
peoples 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

76

integrate young peoples 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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Pascoe

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 peoples 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 peoples 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 Peoples 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

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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 peoples new media practices is
that these technologies are so woven into the
fabric of young peoples 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 peoples 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

78

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 peoples 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 respondents 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
respondents cell phone call logs, he or she might
also ask to see a respondents 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 peoples physical immobility, their
distance from the interviewer, or the difficulty

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Pascoe

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 Peoples 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 respondents 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 peoples 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 peoples lives. In many
ways, this is a boon to social media researchers.
However, these methods raise questions about
methodological, ethical, and structural concerns.

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Qualitative Research in the 21st Century

Methodologically, researchers need to be

aware of the projection of adult use of new media
on to young peoples 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 peoples 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

80

(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 respondents
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.

Pascoe

Studying Young Peoples New Media Use

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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
technologiesthus the need for good qualitative
research on young peoples 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
Martinezs (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 peoples
informal use can draw on findings presented
in the MacArthur Foundations Digital Media
and Learning Initiative and the book Teaching
Tech Savvy Kids (Parker, 2010). Both of these
draw on qualitative research studies of young
peoples 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 reasonsaccess, 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 peoples technology use can
help researchers circumvent institutional barriers,
keep tabs on youth, chronicle easily forgettable
behavior, and provide, in many ways, documentation of young peoples 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.

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In spite of these obstacles, performing research on youth media cultures and practices can
help educators develop pedagogy that integrates
young peoples 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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