Through the Zoom window: how children use virtual technologies to navigate power dynamics in research

ABSTRACT

Virtual technologies gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic for use in research, including research with children. As scholarship from the field of science, technology and society (STS) suggests, technologies are never neutral, but embedded with social values and, as such, used by people to navigate identities and relationships. Building on childhood studies research that has shown how children appropriate and use research tools, this article asks: How do child research participants use this virtual ‘window’ into their homes and their lives? Using observations from a virtual and in-person study in the United States, we show how children used virtual technologies to manage relationships, filter what researchers saw of their lives, and navigate issues of privacy and self-disclosure. We conclude that analysing children’s interactions with research technologies offers important indicators to guide researchers attending to ethical issues of power for both in-person and virtual research with children.

KEYWORDS:

• Science, technology and society (STS)
• zoom interviewing
• virtual methodologies
• qualitative health research
• research with children

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In this article, we use the terms ‘children’ and ‘children and young people,’ which are variably defined in the literature. We view childhood as a generational position and relationship and define the child as a context-specific social category typically demarcated through laws and policies that restrict children’s rights and agency and formalise generational relationships (e.g. consent and assent to research). In the United States, where this research took place, a child is anyone under the age of 18 years old. We use the term ‘children and young people’ to acknowledge the age range in our study and that some of the older participants may not see themselves in the category of the child.

2. Interacting with participants across a series of interviews could also have helped develop greater rapport between the children and the researchers and allow participants to feel more comfortable sharing their experiences with the research team, which could have informed our observations of the children’s disclosures while on Zoom.

3. Because many of the participants used the tablet provided, they may have experienced greater mobility with research technology than if they had joined their Zoom interview on stationary devices like desktop computers. This enhanced mobility may have enabled children to be more selective in what they showed researchers of their lives because they could move the tablet to different rooms or outside of their home.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (R01HL137680)

Notes on contributors

Hannah Fechtel

Hannah Fechtel is a Clinical Research Coordinator at the University of Florida. She has worked with children and young people on various anthropological projects, including studies of child asthma in urban USA and young people’s caregiving in rural USA. Her research interests include cannabis, alcohol, adolescent health, and the anthropology of addiction.

Sienna Ruiz

Sienna Ruiz is a public health research coordinator at Washington University School of Medicine and is an incoming anthropology PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include arts-based methods, critical medical anthropology, space/place, and migration.

Julie Spray

Julie Spray is an interdisciplinary medical and childhood anthropologist who researches children’s perspectives on health and illness, public health policy and interventions, and health inequalities. Her research has been based in Aotearoa New Zealand, the United States, and Ireland with analyses focusing on intersecting issues of rheumatic fever, asthma, stress, infrastructure, nutrition, self-harm, mental health, Covid-19, and health policy. She is currently a lecturer in Children’s Studies at the University of Galway. She is author of The Children in Child Health: Negotiating Young Lives and Health in New Zealand (Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies, 2020).

Erika A. Waters

Erika Waters received her PhD in social psychology from Rutgers University, and a MPH with a concentration in epidemiology from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Her research interests include risk communication, health communication, and health decision making.

James Shepperd

James A. Shepperd is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Florida. His PhD is in social psychology, and he examines judgment and decision making and its implications for health and how people manage threatening information.

Jean Hunleth

Jean Hunleth, PhD, MPH, associate professor of surgery and anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, is a medical anthropologist who studies childhood, illness, and caregiving in Zambia and the Midwestern, United States. She is the author of the award-winning book, Children as Caregivers: The Global Fight against Tuberculosis and HIV in Zambia (Rutgers, 2017).