CHILDREN, MULTIMEDIA CONTENT AND TECHNOLOGICAL ARTEFACTS: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY USING TEXT ANALYSIS TOOLS

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the user experience of young people with video content accessed through different technological artefacts. Design/methodology/approach – To this purpose, an essay has been assigned to the pupils of two lower secondary school classes (mean age 12 years) to know their diverse types of usage of multimedia content in their everyday lives. These compositions have been analysed using a plurality of text analysis tools to find out both the preferred artefacts and their mutual relationships. Findings – The results are here presented giving emphasis to qualitative and methodological aspects. Practical implications – The analysis is to be intended as a preliminary field research study mainly oriented to testing the visualization power of the selected technical tools, primarily network text analysis, in the context of children exposure to video content made available by today’s information and communication technologies. Originality/value – The originality of the paper is characterized by methods used to analyse quantitative data derived from textual compositions of children