Digital Possessions in the Family – an inventory of valued digital possessions

Denegri Knott, Janice and Jenkins, Rebecca (2020) Digital Possessions in the Family – an inventory of valued digital possessions.

Many of the things that are important to us and our families - our music, letters, photographs, games, movies - are now digital, yet we have little understanding of what digital possessions we have or what they mean to children, their parents and grandparents. This pilot study is a collaborative project with industry (Microsoft Research) and two Universities (Bournemouth University and Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University) that will provide insights into what the digitalisation of many objects means in the context of family and methodological testing that will enable future research. A legacy of the project will be a historical record of meaningful digital possessions kept at a unique point in time when children, parents and grandparents have varying degrees of digital media literacy and will provide a benchmark that otherwise will not be possible to create. The data generated will provide a necessary point of departure for future research to map out societal changes. The key objectives for this study were: 1) to generate an inventory of the quantity and types of digital possessions kept and accessed by children, their parents and grandparents, and 2) to explore the value and meanings, children, their parents and grandparents ascribe to their digital possessions. In this bundle we include raw data, top line findings, a copy of the research protocol and categories used to create the inventory.