Challenges of comparative research on youth media participation

Kotilainen, S., & Hirsjärvi, I. (2011). Challenges of comparative research on youth media participation . Zagreb conference: "New challenges and methodological innovations in European media audience research". 7-9 April 2011.

Abstract: Audience research, including children and young people, can be considered mainly western centred and focused on the internet or other single-media. We are broadening the scope more global than Europe, and to the audience-centred research on media participation. We will discuss on the methodologies and challenges of comparative study. As an example, we use our ongoing research on youth media participation (aged 11-18) in four continents of the world. We have developed tools to youth-centred research revealing all-media and cross-media environments. We describe the method combinations including questionnaires, media diaries and focused interviews with multi-sited analysis and contextual reasoning, and discuss the challenges and advantages of the broad intercultural approach. In the research project, a central incentive is to address the question of young audiences in the context of social agency, especially focusing on public dimensions in several kinds of media environments in different continents of the world. As the results of this explorative research, we are expecting to find the related diversity of youth media participation, i.e. several engagements and relationships with media in different cultures. Also similar patterns have been discovered, in spite of the divides which are evitable between developed and developing case countries, and already seen in analysis.