ABSTRACT
Despite widespread speculation about the changing media environment, when we began our research many things were unknown about children’s and young people’s use of media, especially the new media. In this project, we wanted to discover the facts and figures, and the meanings and experiences, associated with media access and use. We also wanted to understand the social contexts of access and use in terms of family, friends, and school, and we wanted to get a handle on the consequences of use for different young people and in different contexts. In this chapter, we elaborate the methods used in the comparative project with the primary aim of making our working procedures transparent. We learned a lot from designing and conducting this large-scale comparative project and hope that others may benefit from our experience, particularly as cross national projects are becoming increasingly common in Europe and elsewhere.
