The Children

Younger Voice conducts research within the membership base of Intuitive Media’s Protected Learning Communities - SuperClubsPLUS and GoldStarCafe - which provide for around 160,000 UK 6 to 14 year old children, and over 14,000 of their teachers

Younger Voice aims to give children a say in their lives and to give decision makers access to the authentic voices of (otherwise hard-to-reach) young people.

Many of the organisation's research initiatives are commissioned by decision makers in government agencies, who really want to know what children think. This means that young people’s views are seriously considered and children can influence contemporary commercial, educational, social and economic policy making.

The children, who participate in the Research Surveys, Test Zones and Learning Channels, are aged 6-14 years. The mean is around 11 years.

Previous research has found their demography matches generally to current UK norms of ethnicity, religion and location, meaning that they are broadly representative of their generation. This is an audience of genuine children and teachers.

Digital Natives
Children’s day-to-day activity in the online learning communities, however, gives these children significant experience of using ICT and the Internet to learn, create, communicate and collaborate with friends and teachers online ­ so in that respect they are a generation of “digital natives”.

Authenticity
Intuitive Media’s Protected Learning Communities offer a unique opportunity to effectively reach and research an audience of authenticated children and teachers. We know with the highest degree of certainty that they are real children of the stated age and gender. The identities of the children in SuperClubsPLUS and GoldStarCafe have been rigorously authenticated.

Children are recruited and validated through their schools. First their teachers are individually authenticated before they join the community, and then teachers nominate their pupils for membership, supplying the children’s names, age and gender to Intuitive Media. This ensures our research surveys and user-testing, and the data they generate are of the highest authenticity and validity and are as trustworthy as surveys and focus groups carried out by researchers visiting schools or homes.

Our research data, however, is derived from a sample of over 1,000 children drawn from a population of 160,000 from over 12,000 classrooms and 100,000 homes spread across the UK.

In addition, online surveys and user tests do not suffer from researcher bias or influence as much as telephone or face-to-face surveys or testing and because there is no pressure to complete the survey within a time limit. Children of all ages and abilities can take all the time they need to provide well-considered responses.

 

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