This paper presents the methodology and findings of a mobile ethnographic study on how Danish 8-17-year-old children and adolescents perceive quality and relevance when it comes to their media use with a focus on series and films. Theoretically, our point of departure is that films and series, as other cultural experiences, have a ‘cultural value’ that is attributed by the beholder (Carnwath and Brown 2014), and these are the values we are interested in pinpointing, albeit from the perspectives of the children, and not from adult perspectives such as high and low culture, artistic quality, or good and bad taste (Drotner 1999).
We collected the data using the method of mobile ethnography, in our case via a qualitative research tool app called Indeemo. Through this method we gave them various tasks relating to their media use – communicated via short online videos and text – that the children in turn completed with a combination of ‘selfie’ videos, text and images gathered in the Indeemo app. The result of this was a rich, but still structured, qualitative data collection that took place in the comfort of their own home and, importantly, was removed from too much adult researcher interference. Hence, the method is different from traditional qualitative methods such as focus groups, observations, experimental settings and in-depth interviews, in which the researcher is relatively conspicuous and – as previous research has established (Coulter 2021; Rooney 2017) – may therefore influence the children’s behaviours and answers.
The results show that the children’s media diets and preferences – and media usage patterns in general – are extremely diverse. Although we do see some overarching tendencies, such as a preference for US films and series and a large consumption on global streaming platforms, the media preferences are extremely individualised among the children, even within the same families. In fact, the children seem to have as individualised a media consumption as adults do. The children are also extremely media literate in as much as they accurately talk about the cinematic qualities (such as acting, budget, plot lines, special effects and so forth) of the films and series they watch, which means that they do not settle for series and films that in their opinion are second-rate. Finally, we find that from the age of 12, children start orienting themselves very much toward content made for (young) adults and are thus no longer inclined to watch children’s content.