HYBRID NETWORK METHODS TO DISENTANGLE DATAFICATION IN THE DOMESTIC CONTEXT

Abstract

Datafication of childhood and family life (Barassi, 2020; Mascheroni & Siibak, 2021) represents one of the main expressions of data colonialism (Couldry & Mejias, 2019). Indeed, data relations are pervading the practices and imaginaries of parenting and childhood to the point of being taken for granted. This poses significant epistemological and methodological challenges. This contribution sets out to advance some methodological proposals to study such phenomena through hybrid methods. Adopting a longitudinal mixed methods research design within a sample of 20 families with young children (0-8 y.o) which combines interviews, observational and visual data (Pink & Leder-Mackley, 2012) and drawing upon the concept of families as communicative figurations (Hepp et al., 2018) we argue that network methods and constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014) appear suited as analytical tools to capture the interactions between data (generated by the media practices of each household’s member) and each family figuration with the goal to foreground the power relations at play and bring to the surface taken for granted practices and imaginaries. The first empirical application showed that these techniques allow to map each family’s constellation of actors, their data practices and imaginaries, and the digital media ensemble highlighting patterns of spatial differentiation and the media-related structure of relationships that unveil household’s power relations and norms. Moreover, the resulting visualisations emerged as worth-experimenting means to foster participants’ reflexivity. These results suggest that CGT methodology and hybrid network methods may represent a way to materialize data relations and disentangle data colonialism in family life.