Peer-reviewed article
Child participation in the design of media and information literacy interventions: A scoping review and thematic analysis
Linus Andersson, Martin Danielsson ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This peer-reviewed review examined scientific articles about media and information literacy interventions for children and adolescents, focusing on how much children participated in designing these interventions. The review found that most interventions had low levels of child participation and tended to focus on behaviour-related outcomes like reducing smoking rather than helping children become skilled media users. The authors argue that without involving children in design, these interventions risk becoming irrelevant to their intended audience.
Key points
- High levels of child participation in intervention design are uncommon in the reviewed literature
- Most interventions aim at 'behavior-relevant' outcomes rather than 'media-relevant' outcomes
- Interventions focused on helping children become competent media users are less widespread than those targeting other behaviours
- Top-down approaches to media and information literacy promotion risk being irrelevant to children
- Child participation should be valued as both a means and an end in promoting children's rights in the digital age
Limitations
This is a scoping review that describes patterns in existing literature rather than evaluating a specific intervention, so it cannot determine what works best or measure outcomes directly. The review does not provide detail on the specific methods used across studies or synthesise quantitative results.
Abstract
The article presents findings from a review of scientific articles about media and information literacy interventions targeted at children and adolescents. More specifically, the review centers on the quantity and quality of child participation in the design of such interventions. The findings indicate that designs with high levels of child participation constitute a minority in the sample. Most of them aim at “behavior-relevant” outcomes, e.g., reduce smoking or obesity. Interventions aimed at “media-relevant” outcomes, e.g., helping children to become competent media users, seem less widespread. Based on these findings, we argue that top-down initiatives to the promotion of media and information literacy among children and adolescents run the risk of becoming irrelevant to the target group, and that child participation in the design of such interventions should be seen as an end in itself, at least if we subscribe to the idea of children’s rights in the digital age.