Interviewing Young Children: a New Interactive Method - ANZMAC

question like “what do you think about this brand?” Or “what imagery do you associate with
brand X?”, the adult interpretation of that is that they do not know exactly what they want
and do not process information easily. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The most currently method used by researchers concerning young targets is the smiling faces
scales, as they attract children’s attention. By the way, in order to answer with a smile,
children should first understand the question and this will require an adult’s participation. An
interesting approach conducted by Wyckham and Collins-Dodd (1997), asked children to
match brands with products by using cards. Young children (from 3 to 6 years old) where
able to choose the images that should go together and showed that they could easily
recognize brands and logos. This experience also showed that children that could not
identify a brand when it was plain script, matched the cards with the real brand very easily.
A defining characteristic of children now a day is that they are highly visual. When facing a
questionnaire, they go directly to the questions with graphs and charts or other visuals,
instead of going through each question as they did before. Based on that fact, Kuhn and
Eischen (1997) recommend researchers to present children with visual-based concepts rather
than verbal statements. This provides children with a framework that they can process and
through which they begin to provide feedback.
According to McNeal and Ji (2003), visual impact matters more with children as they are an
important audience for brand marketers, because not only are they strong influencers and
future purchasers. One important observation is the fact that children pay attention to what is
of interest for them and exclude all the rest. Visual imagery completely dominates the
children recording of memories. Children seem to recognize brands and at some visceral
level, understand their purpose. The image supports an emotional relationship for the
children because they are physical and psychological representations that carry a lot of
emotion. The physical representation will bring a meaning to the child whereas the
psychological representation will bring pleasure (Montigneaux, 2002). The more the child
will identify his/herself to the image, the more he/she will appreciate it and more pleasant
this relationship will be.
Acuff (2000) evokes the implication in packaging, for example, children of this age won’t
pay much or any attention to verbal messages. Visual detail will be far more important as
their brain is likely to focus on a predominant interesting and involving stimulus, as visual
one. Images are more likely to grab their attention that verbal stimuli. Finally, Kline (2003)
underlines that digital games are interactive media because they represent an emancipatory
improvement over traditional one-way media and passive audiences. This one is also one of
the reasons for which we designed the method presented in this paper.
Objectives
The main goal of the present paper is to provide a contribution to the development of
appropriate research methodology addressing young targets. The purpose of the research here
presented was to pre-test a method that could allow children from 3 to 8 years old to
autonomously participate in an interview. The chosen subject was testing children’s toy
preferences in a variety of situations.
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