ABSTRACT
This chapter will present the results from a study which has examined Danish tween girls’ perception of their gender roles and gender identification in relation to their media use and patterns of consumption. It is part of a comparative study between Hong Kong and Denmark. The person responsible in Hong Kong was Professor Kara Chan, Hong Kong Baptist University, and in Denmark, the author of this chapter, at Copenhagen Business School. The title of the project is “Media Consumption and Gender Identity of Tween Girls: A Cross-Cultural Study.” The project is inspired by – and can be considered as a continuation of the project “Children
between Media and Consumption” which was carried out from 2004-6 in Denmark (Tufte 2011) and the comparative project: “Tweens and new media in Denmark and Hong Kong” (Andersen et al. 2007). The aim of the latter was to investigate the media ownership, the use of mobile phones and
the Internet among tweens in Denmark and Hong Kong. As it was a qualitative study, the results cannot be generalized but just be taken as a trend. The results show – among other things – that Danish tweens own and use more new media than tweens in Hong Kong, and the most significant difference was the way they used the Internet. In Hong Kong, the Internet was primary used for school work whereas the Danish tweens mainly used the Internet for fun, entertainment and communication with peers. Professor Kara Chan and I discussed the results and due to the fact that it seemed as if gender
difference played a role, we agreed to carry out a study with focus on the gender perspective in relation to tweens and the Internet. We discussed how to do this and found out that an interesting perspective would be to get the tween girls’ own perception of the images of girls and women in the media. Inspired by anthropological studies where children are given a tape recorder or a camera to register what they find interesting in relation to a specific subject, we decided that we would try to find research means to buy digital cameras for each of the girls
involved, ask them to take photographs of girls and women in the media, including as many media as possible. We would then analyse these photographs and interview the girls on the basis of some of the photos that they had taken. Some of the results from the study have already been published (Chan et al. 2011; Chan 2011).
