Pia Christensen

Is Children's Independent Mobility Really Independent? A Study of Children's Mobility Combining Ethnography and GPS/Mobile Phone Technologies

This article proposes the need for a critical examination of the notion of childrens ‘independent mobility’, a concept rather uncritically accepted by social science and human geography research. It examines the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of the concept by drawing on data from a study of childrens mobility in a suburban area of Copenhagen and two villages in Jutland, Denmark. The study combined ethnography with GPS‐tracking and a rolling mobile phone survey. This produced a rich data set that allows us to show that childrens mobility has to be recognized as primarily social, and that companionship pervades every aspect of the activity. The findings suggest that researchers need to attend to the diversity of childrens mobility patterns, the local geographical contexts of childrens movements and the different relations of interdependency that childrens mobility involves.

Children's Influence on and Participation in the Family Decision Process During Food Buying

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to contribute to studies of family decision making during food buying. In particular a theoretical framework is proposed for structuring future studies of family decision making that include childrens influence and participation at specific stages of the process. Design/methodology/approach - The conceptual framework is developed on the basis of earlier theoretical work focused on family shopping as well as an ethnographic study of parents and children. The framework was refined after testing in a survey with 451 Danish families with children aged ten to 13 using questionnaires for both children and parents. Findings - Family food decision making is often a joint activity, and childrens active participation, among other things, determines the influence they gain. Parents and children do not always agree on how much influence children have in the various stages of the process, indicating the importance of listening to both parties in research into the family dynamics and processes involved in everyday food buying. Research limitations/implications - Future research should further extend the knowledge about the areas where children have influence, about the techniques used by children to achieve influence, and more about those factors that explain when they gain influence. Practical implications - Marketers can benefit from the findings when promoting food products to adults as well as to children. Specifically, the findings suggest that children have most influence on decisions regarding easily prepared meals. Originality/value - This mixed-method approach provides interesting new results, and the main findings emphasise the importance of looking at food decision making as a joint activity where children participate actively and gain influence.

Jumping off and being careful : children's strategies of risk management in everyday life

This article addresses the complexity of childrens risk landscapes through an ethnography of 10- to 12-year-old Danish children. The data revealed how children individually and collectively engaged with risk in their everyday activities. The children assessed risks in relation to their perceptions of their health as strength and control, negotiated the conditions of playing, and attuned their responses to situations of potential social and physical conflict. In the paper this risk engagement is illustrated in a variety of contexts: childrens decisions to wear or not to wear a bicycle helmet; playing and games and routine pushing and shoving at school. In looking after themselves, children negotiate rules of participation and they safeguard personal and collective interests. Gender differences in these processes are addressed and discussed. The article argues that risk engagement is an important resource through which children also learn from their own mistakes. This is a necessary learning process when children engage with their personal health and safety. The article critically discusses different sociological frameworks and shows the significance of the study for the growing literature on understanding the meaning of risk in childhood.

Children, Mobility, and Space: Using GPS and Mobile Phone Technologies in Ethnographic Research

This article discusses the potentials of a mixed methods approach to the study of children’s mobility patterns. The methodology presented here combined ethnographic fieldwork with global positioning system technology and an interactive questionnaire that children completed via mobile phone. This innovative methodology allowed the researchers to generate a rich understanding of children’s everyday movements. The study combined documentation of children’s subjective experiences with systematic observations, mapping, and survey data. The article sets out lessons learned for future mixed methods research into children’s everyday mobility. One such lesson was that it required the interdisciplinary research team to cooperate closely through dialogue, support, and coordination of activities and perspectives. The approach also promoted the children’s commitment to the study.

‘Walking … just walking’: how children and young people's everyday pedestrian practices matter

This paper considers the importance of walking for many children and young peoples everyday lives, experiences and friendships. Drawing upon research with 175 9- to 16-year-olds living in new urban developments in south-east England, we highlight key characteristics of (daily, taken-for-granted, ostensibly aimless) walking practices, which were of constitutive importance in children and young peoples friendships, communities and geographies. These practices were characteristically bounded, yet intense and circuitous. They were vivid, vital, loved, playful, social experiences yet also dismissed, with a shrug, as ‘just walking’. We argue that ‘everyday pedestrian practices’ (after Middleton 2010, 2011) like these require critical reflection upon chief social scientific theorisations of walking, particularly the large body of literature on childrens independent mobility and the rich, multi-disciplinary line of work known as ‘new walking studies’. In arguing that these lines of work could be productively interrelated, we propound ‘just walking’—particularly the often-unremarked way it matters—as a kind of phenomenon which is sometimes done a disservice by chief lines of theory and practice in social and cultural geography.

Children, young people and sustainability: introduction to special issue

This special issue draws together diverse new research papers about children and young people’s lives, practices and knowledges relating to sustainability and environmental or ecological issues. The special issue emerged from two sessions on children, young people and “sustainability” at the Annual International Conference of the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers, held in London in 2010. The sessions were organised by the members of the New Urbanisms, New Citizens project: a three-year programme of research exploring children and young people’s everyday lives and citizenship in new “sustainable communities” in England. Our decision to organise the conference sessions, and subsequently convene this special issue, was rooted in three observations. First, there is now a substantial, international body of evidence – from diverse educational (Hacking and Barrett 2007, Hicks and Holden 2007, Davis 2009), psychological (Koger and du Nann Winter 2010), sociological (Grønhøj 2007, Larsson et al. 2010) and geographical research (Morgan 2006) – demonstrating that childhood and youth are typically crucial periods in the socialisation and (re)production of individual habits, norms, dispositions, values, lifestyles, identities and feelings of care and belonging which can have all manner of complex, enduring environmental, ecological and political consequences. At the same time, beyond explicit work on childhood and youth, theoretical approaches to behaviour change have cohered around integrated theories of social practice that have sought to account for the socialisation and reproduction of norms around the environment (e.g. Shove et al. 2012). Drawing on similar concerns with habits, norms and dispositions, such theories have crucially, demonstrated the ineluctable interplay of internal (psychological) and external (social) factors in fostering environmentally relevant knowledges and behaviours (Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002). In this way, ‘practices’ are figured as constellations or networks of discourses, performances and materials: the interlinking of multiple actions within a given context (such as an institution) that produce longer-standing dispositions; the significance of material objects – cars, recycling bins, energy monitors – to the production of behavioural norms; the accordance of meaning – and emotion – to particular behaviours such that they become understood as imperatives (or not) (Poortinga et al. 2004; Shove et al. 2012). The sessions sought to explore how children and young people acquire knowledge and norms of sustainability issues, and how and where these knowledge are practiced (or not) within everyday spaces. Second, the sessions also emerged from a range of rich, recent social scientific and educational literature detailing some of the important ways in which children and young people are participants in everyday communities of practice which have complex, multiscalar environmental, ecological and political consequences (Hicks 1994, 2012, Jeffrey and Dyson 2008, Bordonaro and Payne 2012, Punch and Tisdall 2012). For example, the sessions sought to explore the extent and characteristics of children and young people’s participation in diverse domestic spaces, family practices, school communities, everyday routines, neighbourhoods and locally, nationally or globally politicised issues salient to sustainability.

Children Living in Sustainable Built Environments: New Urbanisms, New Citizens

Urban living has dramatically changed over the past generation, refashioning children’s relationships with the towns and cities in which they live, and the modes of living within them. Focusing on the global shift in urban planning towards sustainable urbanism - from master planned ‘sustainable communities’, to the green retrofitting of existing urban environments - Children Living in Sustainable Built Environments offers a critical analysis of the challenges, tensions and opportunities for children and young people living in these environments. Drawing upon original data, Children Living in Sustainable Built Environments demonstrates how the needs, interests and participation of children and young people often remain inferior to the design, planning and local politics of new urban communities. Considering children from their crucial role as residents engaging and contributing to the vitalities of their community, to their role as consumers using and understanding sustainable design features, the book critically discusses the prospects of future inclusion of children and young people as a social group in sustainable urbanism. Truly interdisciplinary, Children Living in Sustainable Built Environments forms an original theoretical and empirical contribution to the understanding of the everyday lives of children and young people and will appeal to academics and students in the fields of education, childhood studies, sociology, anthropology, human geography and urban studies, as well as policy-makers, architects, urban planners and other professionals working on sustainable urban designs.

Mobilidades cotidianas das crianças: combinando etnografia, GPS e tecnologias de telefone móvel em pesquisa

This article discusses the development of a mixed methods approach to the study of childrens everyday mobility. The study presented here combined ethnographic fieldwork with GPS (Global Positioning System) technology and an interactive questionnaire that the children completed via mobile phone. This methodology permitted the researchers to generate a fuller understanding of childrens everyday movements through the rich dataset documenting childrens subjective experiences, systematic observations, mapping and survey data. We conclude that the success of mixed methods research requires close cooperation through interdisciplinary dialogue and mutual engagement in and coordination of activities and perspectives.