Mimi Tatlow-Golden

This review aimed to identify and evaluate methods to measure children’s actual exposure (marketing that actually reaches children) to food marketing in digital media. Monitoring actual marketing exposure in digital media is challenging. It is delivered via complex, data-driven, personalized systems to children’s personal devices—so viewing this presents privacy and methodological challenges. Digital marketing monitoring therefore often instead assesses potential exposure (marketing that children are likely to encounter in their usual digital places). Yet, measuring actual exposure is essential for policy development, enforcement, and research. We searched for eligible articles published during 2000–2024 using free-text searches combined with database thesauruses in Academic Search Complete (EBSCOhost), Ovid Medline, CINAHL (EBSCOhost), PsycInfo (EBSCOhost), and Scopus. A horizon scan, gray literature search, and consultation with experts were also performed. Data extracted were (1) type of method and tools, (2) how the method captures data, (3) challenges and limitations, (4) researcher burden, (5) recruitment and retention, (6) privacy, and (7) food marketing definitions and nutrient profiling system applied. We identified 25 sources (reporting on 16 studies) and grouped these into 4 methods clusters, each with different attributes and limitations: screen capture, where participants’ device screen is recorded while they use it; wearable cameras, which capture participants’ exposure to all marketing across a day; screenshots of self-identified marketing captured by participants themselves; and automated extraction of paid advertising metadata using software installed on participants’ devices. Screen capture is currently the optimal method. No identified method is straightforward: all carry a heavy data management and analysis load and involve trade-offs of validity, ease of use, privacy, and overall cost. Capturing children’s screens with currently available tools is challenging, but the benefits are clear, as identifying children’s actual exposure to harmful marketing in digital media is essential.

Purpose: This study aimed to examine consumers planned versus actual behaviour when grocery shopping, and to understand consumers' motivations for purchasing grocery items on promotional offer, to inform retailer promotional strategy. Design/methodology/approach: The study employed a mixed methods approach using a pre-shop survey; an accompanied shop and a post-shop survey to assess. The study sample comprised 48 participants aged over 18 years old who identified themselves as the main household shopper. Findings: Results identified six themes relating to shopper discourse: (1) Bargains that benefit the household budget; (2) The buzz of a bargain; (3) Savvy stockpiling; (4) Active avoidance of available offers; (5) Reliance on regular reductions and (6) Using deals to dictate dinner. Originality/value: This study uses a novel method to gather insightful qualitative data on consumer attitudes towards promotions in a real-life supermarket setting. The novelty of this study is the previously under-explored relationship between individual decision-making, store environment and processes when buying grocery items on promotional offer within the real-life supermarket setting. This research therefore provides insightful, original evidence in this field authentically exploring consumer attitudes and perceptions towards promotions, and the need for retail managers to develop strategies that assist shoppers to make healthier choices while grocery shopping.

The UK’s Health and Care Act (2022; paused until 2025) includes a globally novel ban on paid-for online advertising of food and beverage products high in saturated fat, salt and sugar (HFSS), to address growing concerns about the scale of digital marketing and its impact in particular on children’s food and beverage preferences, purchases and consumption. This study aimed to understand the potential impact of the novel ban (as proposed in 2020) on specified forms of online HFSS advertising, through the lens of interdisciplinary expertise. We conducted semi-structured interviews via videoconference with eight purposively selected UK and global digital marketing, food and privacy experts. We identified deductive and inductive themes addressing the policy’s scope, design, implementation, monitoring and enforcement through iterative, consensual thematic analyses. Experts felt this novel ‘breakthrough’ policy has potential to substantially impact global marketing by establishing the principle of no HFSS advertising online to consumers of all ages, but they also identified substantive limitations that could potentially render it ‘entirely ineffective’, for example, the exclusion of common forms of digital marketing, especially brand marketing and marketing integrated within entertainment content; virtual/augmented reality, and ‘advertainment’ as particularly likely spaces for rapid growth of digital food marketing; and technical digital media issues that raise significant barriers to effective monitoring and compliance. Experts recommended well-defined regulations with strong enforcement mechanisms. These findings contribute insights for effective design and implementation of global initiatives to limit online HFSS food marketing, including the need for government regulations in place of voluntary industry restrictions.

The time between childhood and adulthood, when young people are not physically or socially mature but are less dependent than younger children, has been intensively scrutinised by many disciplines. In this chapter, we show that studying this period of life holistically requires integrating perspectives to see interplays between social, biological, psychological, cultural, and historical understandings. We ask why this time of life is often characterised in quite negative terms and as a time of stress and disruption and whether this is necessarily the case. We discuss the invention of the teenager; historical and cultural understandings of youth; young people’s views of adolescence; development in brains, bodies, selves, and peers; and young people’s political activism.

What is childhood? How can we understand children and young people’s lives and experiences? Why is childhood and youth experienced differently across communities and countries? How can we support children to develop, grow, and be well? What do they have to teach us? The very notions of what ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’ are may seem utterly obvious – and yet as you will learn, they are really not that obvious at all. This Reader explores Childhood and Youth Studies and Psychology, taking a novel interdisciplinary approach that combines insights from both disciplines to illuminate key topics in childhood and youth in a complementary way. This chapter offers a first outline of the topics taught throughout the Reader as well as its key themes: the social and cultural construction of childhood and development; inequities and intersectionalities; and the importance of considering children and young people’s rights, agency, and perspectives.

This chapter introduces you to the psychology of childhood and youth. Psychology is a wide-ranging field that seeks to apply the scientific method to explaining minds, brains, and behaviour and to achieve the best outcomes for children and young people, and it has become dominant in interpreting childhood and youth and particularly child and adolescent development. Yet the field itself is beginning to question its century-long assumptions that universal ‘norms’ can be identified from research with urban, wealthy White children in the global North. The chapter introduces principles of key quantitative and qualitative psychological research methods with multiple illustrative examples, including the ‘marshmallow test’, to show how psychological research findings evolve over time. It also makes the case that children and young people may be more competent than adults, that they are differentially sensitive to their contexts, and that culture is a crucial feature of childhood development.

This exciting new book provides a novel interdisciplinary introduction to Childhood and Youth Studies and Psychology. Its accessible approach illuminates holistic understandings of children and young people’s lives by drawing from multiple disciplines and theoretical frameworks and wide-ranging research examples, including case studies from around the world, featuring children and young people’s perspectives throughout. Weaving insights from education and cultural studies, social anthropology, and sociology with social, cultural, and developmental psychology, it covers children and young people’s experiences and development from infancy to young adulthood (0–23 years) and their rights. Chapters explore key contemporary topics such as the following: Digital childhood and youth Children’s embodied experiences The social and cultural origins of selves Diverse families Race and ethnicity Global childhoods Models for understanding health and disability Children’s rights and agency Gender in childhood and youth An essential reading for students on childhood and youth, psychology, and education courses, An Introduction to Childhood and Youth Studies and Psychology is also a valuable introductory resource for practitioners working with children and young people and for parents and policy makers with an interest in how we understand children and young people’s lives today.

The self is the core of who we are, and it is central to our ability to function. In childhood and youth, the self is not only shaped by individual characteristics and development but also crucially by interactions with the people, places, things, societies, and cultures, which children and young people experience. This chapter introduces the self in development, in the social world, and in culture. It first explains what self-concept and self-esteem are and the impact they can have on children and young people’s lives. It then explores how caregivers’ interactions with young children shape self-concept and self-esteem with potentially enduring effects. The final section introduces a study of young adolescents’ views of the relationships and activities that are most important to them, shared through drawings and interviews. The study identifies what psychological researchers get right when they design research questionnaires to measure young people’s self-esteem – and what young people’s contributions and analyses show that adults miss.

Summary: Food and beverage marketing appealing to children and adolescents has an impact on their food preferences, purchases requests, consumption patterns, health outcomes, and obesity. The objective of this study was to assess the nature and extent of food and beverage marketing on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube posts in Mexico. This was a content analysis that followed the World Health Organization CLICK methodology to comprehend the landscape of digital food marketing campaigns of the top‐selling food products and brands and the most popular accounts carried out between September and October 2020. A total of 926 posts from 12 food and beverage products and 8 brands were included. Facebook was the social media platform with the most posts and greatest engagement. The most prevalent marketing techniques were brand logo, image of packaging, image of the product itself, hashtags, and engagement to consume. Fifty percent of the posts were assessed as appealing to children, 66% to adolescents, and 80% to either children or adolescents. Ninety‐one percent of products (n = 1250) were classified as unhealthy according to the Mexican warning labels nutrient profile; 93% of the food promoted on posts appealing to either children or adolescents were unhealthy. Hashtags commonly referred to the COVID‐19 pandemic. Most of the unhealthy food digital marketing features marketing techniques that appeal to children or adolescents; moreover, the use of the pandemic hashtag reflected brands' responsiveness to the environment at the time of the study. The present data contribute to evidence supporting the strengthening of food marketing regulations in Mexico.