Living Journals: introducing a new digital participatory approach to study young children’s digital media practices

Researching daily activities of young children poses methodological challenges that necessitate diverse approaches for effective inquiry. This method article introduces a new digital participatory research method–Living Journals–to study young children's everyday digital media practices at home in Azerbaijan. Employing this method, mothers actively produced multimodal data in situ, responding to prompts sent by the researcher, which were subsequently turned into journals in print and digital formats. Utilising these journals, participant families were encouraged to provide commentary on their respective journals and those of other participating children. This method has a significant capacity to yield metatextual, multivocal, multimodal, and multifunctional data, thereby enhancing the richness of the dataset and facilitating nuanced interpretations. Delving into the intricacies of the method and its advantages, the article elaborates on its procedures, significance, and limitations. The method emerges as a valuable approach, offering a participatory and contextually sensitive means for remotely generating data, allowing researchers to develop textually and visually rich datasets.