Engaging children to voice their sense of place through location-based story making with photo-story maps

ABSTRACT

Sense of place is neither linear nor rooted in time. One way for children to voice their sense of place is through location-based stories with plots structured in space, rather than time. Since mobile devices are already ingrained in the everyday lives of many children in the U.S., a mobile application offers a familiar medium to engage children in location-based story making. Here, we present photo-story maps, our approach to leveraging an existing story-map mobile application as a research tool to collect and analyze children’s stories about sense of place. We found that photo-story maps facilitate the organization of nonlinear location-based stories, promote an inclusive story-making process through a mobile application, support triangulation of varied digital story elements, and provide dynamic interview material. We suggest photo-story maps demonstrate the value of location-based story making and the potential of familiar mobile applications for reducing the barriers to including children in research.

KEYWORDS:

• Photo-story maps
• sense of place
• mobile application
• children
• voice

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the children who participated in our study in Denver, Colorado, and the community partner organization for their support throughout the study. We also thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable insights that helped us articulate our observations, better clarify our conclusions, and substantially improve this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Corey J. Martz http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8006-4175