journal of digital research & publishing - The Sydney eScholarship ...

1 P M J O U R N A L O F D I G I T A L R ESEARCH & P UBLISHING
environment.
The survey also suggested that parental concerns regarding advertising were more
focused on TV and that children were exposed to ‘too many ads’. There was no suggestion
or notion, of the marketing campaigns occurring on ‘Advergame’ sites that their child may
be engaging in. In another survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation (2003) parents of
0­6 year old children reported that most parents have media­related rules but were more
concerned with the content of what their child engaged with.
Advergame site ­ Kidswirl
Exploring the digital space of Kidswirl a self proclaimed FaceBook like site for kids, as
young as two years offers the usual spaces similar in colour and texture to FaceBook, where
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are designed with personal details and their status sometimes protected, others times
exposed. Surrounding these online ‘kids only ,but the parents are in control’ communities
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ad appearing out of place. More concerning is the suggestion to collect coins by clicking
on these ads. If you click more than 20 times a day, you get extra points where you can
purchase various items in games. There is also a page for the champion coin collectors.
Blogging Parents and ethics approval
Ethnography’ is the approach of this short study which begins with the question, what are
the perceptions of parents of their child’s engagement with Advergames’? As the social
actor of this investigation and outside the child’s digital culture, I will investigate various
websites where parental discourse is drawn through the use of blog postings of interests
into how their child navigates this space.
The all encompassing question of acquiring ethics approval for online behavioral research
has been concerning with discussions to the University ethics department, however on the
guidance of Gosling and Johnson (2010), Online Behavioral Research, the social actor/
author has been persuaded to accept that trawling online for data or blogs in this instance
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online postings ‘represent the public domain’. Gosling and Johnson (2010) mention that
researchers do not need to obtain informed consent in this instance. What does need to
be mentioned is that this area of ethics approval is currently unknown and open to debate.
Beginning this journey into parent perceptions, or lack of, hopes to unveil some of the
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