XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

135

Studying Family Life, Digital Technologies, and Social Media: Perspectives and Methods

RC06 Family Research (host committee)

Language: English

Despite the growing pervasiveness of digital technologies, such as the Internet and social media, in some industrial societies, research on its impact on families remains scant. Additionally, researchers are still exploring and developing perspectives and methods that can fully capture the relationships between the usage (or non-usage) of digital technology and their appropriation, domestication, and influence in family life, including in family routines, intergenerational dynamics, time management, norms, intimacy, conflict, and work-life balance. For example, a largely missing perspective in current scholarship is a life course approach ­– the existing literature tends to focus on studies of a particularly age group or life stage (e.g., children or young adults), neglecting the interplay of different roles, positions, meanings, and contexts over a person’s life span. Concurrently, the application of digital research methods (nethnography, web scraping and analytics, digital network analysis, data visualizations, etc.) has been gaining popularity amongst researchers, but we still lack a comprehensive understanding of the opportunities and challenges of conducting research with these methods, including of ethical issues in the time of the so-called ‘Big Data’. This session calls for theoretical, methodological, and empirical work on family and digital technologies to provide a critical and informed examination of this topic.