The Everyday Childhoods collection is a qualitative longitudinal dataset that was collected by researchers from the Universities of Sussex and Brighton and the Open University during 2013-15. The initial project, called ‘Face 2 Face: Tracing the real and the mediated in children’s cultural worlds’ (F2F) was funded by an NCRM Methodology Innovation award. The primary aim of the project was to explore how technologies documented and mediated the everyday in children's daily lives. The F2F project generated the majority of the data contained in this collection and the dataset comprises data from two research panels: firstly, a younger panel (the 'extensive' panel) of children aged 7-8 years (n=6) who had previously been involved with their families in an ESRC funded study of new motherhood ('The Making of Modern Motherhoods: Memories, Representations, Practices'). Their geographical location ranged across the South, South East and South West of England. Secondly, an older panel (the 'intensive' panel) of children aged 10-15 years (n=7) were recruited for the first time in this study. Their geographical location was focused in the South East of England. This latter sample were recruited to illustrate a diversity of youth experiences and identities, including along intersectional lines of ethnicity, religion, dis/ability, urban/rural locality, and economic background. Over the course of 12 months, both groups of children took part in a series of regular research activities aimed at capturing their everyday lives.Face 2 Face: Tracing the Real and the Mediated in Children’s Cultural Worlds (2013-14) was a 12-month methodological innovation project funded by the ESRC’s National Centre for Research Methods. The study documented thirteen children and young people’s everyday lives over a 12-month period, focusing on how new media technologies were infused in their everyday lives and relationships. The research team worked with two panels: a group of 8 year olds who were part of an established longitudinal study of new motherhood and had been followed since before birth, and a newly established panel of 11-15 year olds. Using a combination of biographical, ethnographic and digital/material methods, the research team worked closely with participants and their families to document their everyday lives. One of the key outputs of the research was a set of public multimedia documents that experimented with using data from the study to depict the children's lives. These multi-modal documents used the digital sound recordings, photographs, ethnographic descriptions and other data captured during the different phases of the study. Ethical practice around the documentation and curation of data about children's lives was a key strand of the study, and were further developed through an AHRC funded follow-up study: 'Curating Childhoods'. This study enabled the to follow up questions about the use of research data in digital age into the domains of archiving and data sharing. As part of this follow up project, participants from the Face 2 Face study were invited to take part in a one-day workshop at the Mass Observation Archive to discuss the future archiving and re-use of their data.

(1) ‘Favourite Things’ interviews – Carried out with each participant at the beginning of the study, during which children were invited to share ‘favourite’ possessions in their homes with a focus on objects that connected to their past and objects that connected to their future. The interviews were audio recorded and transcribed and the children’s objects were photographed. (2) Family interviews - To gain a sense of the children’s everyday routines, some of the children’s families were interviewed about a typical day in their household. These interviews typically included the child and at least one parent, and sometimes siblings and extended family. The family interviews were audio recorded and transcribed (3) ‘Day in a life’ observations – Each child was ethnographically observed by a researcher over a single day. These included school days, holidays and weekend days – and were normally chosen by the child in conjunction with their parent. The researchers drew on multimodal practices of ethnographic observation – collecting visual and audio data alongside traditional field notes. (4) Recursive interviews – At the conclusion of the 12 months of fieldwork, each child took part in a final interview to look back on their participation in the study, and to look at the data collected as part of the project. All younger children, and some older children, were interviewed with their parents. Data was presented back to the participants in curated multimedia documents which were intended to be shared publicly on the project’s website with the permission of children and parents.