Making sense of gender from digital game play in three-year-old children’s everyday lives: An ethnographic case study [Full text]
Youn Jung Huh [1]
| Abstract: This study explores very young children performing and talking about game characters in their everyday life. In this study, young children’s digital game play is considered as a hybrid and complex site for the children to meet popular culture and their everyday family experiences. This article represents a case study of six three-year-old children and their families, which combines ethnographic methods (spending time with the families, being a participant observer) and critical perspectives analysis with Bakhtinian perspectives to construct analyses that have the potential to understand how young children make sense of their everyday roles as a boy or a girl through their game play. This study shows that young children do not directly receive ideological messages from the game media, but they make sense of the messages by decoding and interpreting the game media based on their own theories of everyday life. Keywords: Gender performance, digital game, young children, everyday practice, ethnographic case study |
[1] Ph.D, Salem State University, Salem, United States of America, yhuh@salemstate.ed