Studying the datafied home: The potentials of combining mixed methods, constructivist grounded theory and social network analysis

Studying datafication of childhood and family life poses relevant methodological and epistemological challenges that require a critical approach to data. This talk sets out to advance some methodological proposals illustrating an ongoing research in the Italian context. Drawing upon the concept of families as communicative figurations, the project articulates a longitudinal mixed methods research design within a sample of 20 families with young children (0-8 y.o), which combines interviews, observational and visual data. With the goal to foreground the power relations at play and bring to the surface taken for granted practices and imaginaries, network methods and constructivist grounded theory were adopted as analytical tools to capture the interactions between data and each family figuration. The preliminary results suggest that this combination of hybrid methods represents worth-experimenting means to materialise data relations and foster reflexivity to disentangle data colonialism in family life.