Children are essentially invisible in theories of consumer society and culture, despite their presence and centrality in everyday life. In this article, I argue that children and childhood, and thus mothers and motherhood, must be acknowledged and investigated as constitutive of — rather than derivative of or exceptional to — commercial, consumer culture generally. The focus here is not on how to better accommodate children and childhood (and mothers and motherhood) within extant notions of consumption and consumer culture, but to begin to open up the field of consumption studies to the essential and non-negotiable presence of children and childhood throughout social life.

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Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to offer a selective and necessarily truncated history of the place and use of qualitative approaches in the study of children's consumption in order to provide some depth of understanding regarding differences between and commonalities of approaches employed by academic market researchers, social science researchers and, to a lesser extent, market practitioners. Design/methodology/approach-The paper examines key research statements about children's consumption beginning in the 1930s to ascertain the underlying conception of the child informing the work. Findings-It is argued that there has been a displacement of psychologically oriented, developmental conceptions of the child with sociological and anthropological conceptions resulting in an acceptance of the child as a more or less knowing, competent consumer. This shift has become manifest in a rise and acceptance of qualitative research on children's consumer behaviour by social science and marketing academics as well as by market practitioners such as market researchers. Research limitations/implications-Methods-here qualitative methods-must be seen as enactments of theories about conceptions of the person, rather than simply as neutral tools that uncover extant truths. Practical implications-Attending to how one ''constructs'' the child may usefully inform debates about the harmfulness or usefulness of goods and messages directed to children. Originality/value-This paper helps in understanding the long history of children as consumers, how they have been understood and approached by market and academic researchers interested in consumption and various ways conceptions of 'the child' can be used. Keywords Qualitative methods, Market research, Children (age groups), Consumer behaviour Paper type Research paper Q ualitative research on children's consumer culture, behaviour and lives continues to gain adherents and favour among academic researchers, market researchers and practitioners. Observations of and interviews with children-now staple components of the services that market research firms offer-often inform merchandising, packaging, advertising campaigns and the creation and management of products and brands intended for children's consumption or use. Ethnographic studies, large and small, examining the place of goods in children's lives appear with some regularity in academic journals and on the lists of scholarly publishers. Grouping research together under the rubric of the ''qualitative'' study of children's consumption, however, can elide key philosophical and epistemological differences in research practices and traditions. Indeed, within academic circles those who align themselves with the social sciences, like sociology and anthropology, differ from market researchers in terms of the nature, subject and purpose of research. A market researcher working for a firm who for instance is conducting a study of children's preferences for a particular product or brand may achieve desirable outcomes while never addressin...

Scholars interested in the lives of children and in the social contours of childhood have remained largely inattentive to the consumer popular culture in which these lives are embedded and out of which particular versions of childhood have arisen. Consumption, and its kindred areas of media and popular culture, are arenas of social action and meaning that many researchers avoid, ignore or otherwise act as if they are of little consequence despite their ubiquitous presence in the life-worlds of children and families.

This article examines how notions of "the child" were constructed in marketing research literature from the 19 10s through the 1990s. Drawing on children's industry trade literature, market reports and books, I argue that children have become increasingly portrayed as individualized, autonomous consumers. Over this time period, the desire for consumer products becomes figured by industry observers and researchers as a mode of children's "self expression." The analytic isolation of "the child" in the persona of a "consumer" authorizes a new morality for consumption by construing children's desire for goods as preexistent and thus natural.Markets do not exist in nature, yet everywhere in a capitalist economy they appear as natural and given. They arise and gain outline only when observers have had their gaze prepared to translate social activity into market behavior. Interpreting any activity as market behavior relies upon assumptions about motivations for action and decision making. In the neoclassical conception of competitive markets, the basis of these motivations and decisions is understood as presocial, hence natural, and essentially out of the control of individuals. From the viewpoint of marketers and advertisers, their work consists of nurturing or directing a natural process, not inventing a social one.A market, seen in this way, is thus a way of knowing-a way of apprehending human activity. Markets, and those who work in their service, both demand and create multiple forms of knowledge requisite to render the consumer knowable. Markets are forms of social organization based as much on the individual decisions of individualized actors as on working models of "the consumer" or "actor" from which consuming decisions are seen to arise. From the standpoint of a marketer or advertiser, being able to give the customer what he or she "wants" depends upon being able to make entrke into the dimensions of consumer desire. Desire becomes tangible, and perhaps manipulable, when repeatable measures are taken of its shape, direction, and intensity and applied to the level of an aggregate, such as a population segment.