2021 - 2023 | FWO
Objective
Children as young as kindergarten already demonstrate a remarkable capacity for perceiving and judging differences in ‘social status’. Between the ages of 4 to 12, this capacity develops considerably, and by the time that children enter high school their judgments of ‘class’ already start to closely mirror those of adults. The fact that children demonstrate this early ability to judge persons and objects in terms of their social status and do so on the basis of a limited experience with the adult world of work, career, and status raises a simple, yet quite fundamental question: where do children acquire their knowledge of status-differences, class-hierarchy, and social inequality? This study aims to find an answer to this question by focusing on a cultural genre that has become increasingly prominent in shaping the lifeworld of children, namely animated movies. It has a twofold research objective. Firstly, it will aim to analyze the specific ways in which this cultural genre represents differences in social status and class position through a detailed content analysis of thirty of the most popular animated movies. Secondly, it will study how children themselves in turn interpret these representations and use them to construct their understanding of the adult world of class and status through a series of semi-structured interviews with 150 children using a specifically developed method of video-elicitation.
