Investigating Patterns of Digital Socialisation During Leisure Through Multimodal Social Research

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter offers an exploration of the methodological potentials, challenges, and pitfalls associated with conducting multimodal research on patterns of digital socialisation during leisure, while focusing on the involvement of children as co-researchers. A comprehensive research design is suggested for investigating children and young people’s digital leisure activities using a multimodal approach. This design aims to explore communication and representations by leveraging an innovative process of integrating and interpreting information from diverse modalities. This process, known as semantic data integration, allows for a cohesive analysis of multimodal data, enabling a deeper understanding of the subject matter. The design emphasises the active involvement of research contributors, who not only participate as subjects but also play a role as co-researchers. The chapter provides a detailed description and critical assessment of the methodologies adopted across all parts of the fieldwork conducted to investigate children’s online leisure habits and digital technologies use and identifies the significant qualities of a multimodal and multi-method approach. The methods are evaluated to deliver suggestions for practises that can be adopted in having children play an active part through research implementation. Semantic integration is suggested to bridge the gap between different modalities and extract comprehensive understanding of collected data.