Enhancing sociality, self-presentation, and play: a case study of digital scenarios among schoolchildren in an epidemic context

ABSTRACT

This study explores what types of digital life scenarios children practiced while facing the challenges of epidemic isolation, in which distance learning and limited social contact depended largely on new digital platforms. The study of children’s mediatised activities within epidemic isolation can be approached from the perspective of radical contextualism, which has been widely used since the ethnographic turn in audience research that began in the late 1980s. Following this conceptual framework, the aim of the study is to identify the predominant experiences of isolated everyday life in a case study of schoolchildren and uncover typical collective groupings among young people. Based on a follow the child perspective, an online survey was conducted at a selected primary school, targeting children from 6th to 9th grade, to capture children’s perceptions of online education and distance learning, prevalent digital use and their personal digital positioning. In an analytical sense, the collected sample of 110 schoolchildren was categorised using a cluster analysis to identify the typical scenarios of digital culture and show the diversity of online practices that children experienced during the COVID-19 isolation, even in a relatively homogeneous group of schoolchildren.

KEYWORDS:

• schoolchildren
• digital media practices
• case study
• quantitative analysis
• epidemic context

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The given items were generated as an exploratory attempt to capture youth activities enhanced online. Some of the items have been partially used in previous studies as well (e.g., Jontes & Oblak Črnič, 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Slovenian Research Agency: [Grant Number P5-0136, P5-0399, J5-2564].

Notes on contributors

Tanja Oblak Črnič

Tanja Oblak Črnič is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Her research interests include internet studies and theories of digital media, focused primarily to domestication of media technologies, youth digital cultures and appropriation of digital media in political communication.

Barbara Neža Brečko

Barbara Neža Brečko is a researcher at the Center for Social Science Informatics, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. She holds a PhD in social sciences methodology. The main area of her work is social science research methodology, focusing primarily on young people, ICT and education. Between 2012 and 2014 she was employed as a researcher at the Joint Research Center of the European Commission (JRC EC) in Seville, Spain.