Edging out of the nest: emerging adults’ use of smartphones in maintaining and transforming family relationships

Abstract

The transition to adulthood, often accompanied by an emptying of the family nest, has implications for family relationships, identities and consumption practices. Despite this, the voices and experiences of emerging adults are largely missing from literature on family consumption. Emerging adult families typically combine digital natives and digital immigrants, but little is known about how their interactions around digital communications technology relate to emerging adult preoccupations with affiliation and autonomy. This interpretive study explores how emerging adults’ smartphones are bound up with a complex network of family communication and consumption practices, often across household, geographic and generational boundaries. Affiliation and autonomy emerged as intertwined rather than competing dimensions of participants’ smartphone use, contributing to the distribution and development of family as the nest empties.

Keywords:

• emerging adults
• family relationships
• smartphones
• consumption
• life-course transitions
• affinity/autonomy

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the reviewers for their constructive comments which have greatly contributed to the analytical framework of the paper. We would also like to thank Aliette Lambert for her practical support and encouragement throughout the process.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Caroline Marchant

Caroline Marchant is an Early Career Fellow in Marketing at The University of Edinburgh Business School. Following more than 20 years as a marketing practitioner, consultant and teacher, her interest in research led her to take up a full-time academic post and a PhD at Edinburgh, exploring the role of personal technologies in extended family life. Her current interests also include experiences of liminality among emerging adults and financial socialisation of children. Caroline has presented her work at international conferences and combines her academic and professional experience by writing case studies.

Stephanie O’Donohoe

Stephanie O’Donohoe is Professor of Advertising and Consumer Culture at The University of Edinburgh Business School. A graduate of the College of Marketing and Design (now DIT) and of Trinity College, Dublin, her PhD, undertaken at Edinburgh, explored young adults’ experiences of advertising. Her current research interests include the working lives of advertising creatives; consumption experiences during bereavement and in the transition to motherhood; and children and emerging adults as consumers. Her work has been presented at international marketing and interdisciplinary conferences and published in edited collections and journals including the European Journal of Marketing, Human Relations and the Journal of Marketing Management. She is on the editorial boards of several journals and co-chaired the 2014 interdisciplinary Child and Teen Consumption Conference. She is co-chairing the 2015 Interpretive Consumer Research Workshop, to be held in Edinburgh.