This article proposes the living journals method for remotely studying participants, elevating participant agency in the data generation process and minimising or completely removing the need for a researcher to be physically present in the field. Employing this method, the paper describes how the method was used to explore 5-year-old children’s digital practices in five families in Azerbaijan. Mothers were assigned as ‘proxy’ researchers to generate the data following prompts sent through a smartphone application. Mothers’ answers were used to create journals, and subsequently, fathers separately, and mothers and children together were requested to interpret their own journals and those of other participant children. Allowing other families to comment on one another’s journals further revealed their attitudes towards using digital technologies and enriched the data, emphasising its multivocality and metatextuality. The article describes the living journals method in detail, highlighting its affordances for researchers to generate data from a distance in other contexts. The article also discusses the methodological and empirical contribution of the method to this study about young children’s engagements with digital media at home. By decentring the researcher in the data generation process, the method allows researchers to generate both visually and textually complex and rich data. The visual and personal nature of the method goes beyond text-based research accounts to bring the data to life, allowing the researcher to generate multimodal, multivocal, metatextual and multifunctional data.

The worldwide refugee crisis is a major current challenge, affecting the health and education of millions of families with children due to displacement. Despite the various challenges and risks of migration practices, numerous refugee families have access to interactive technologies during these processes. The aim of this ongoing study is to explore the role of technologies in the transitions of refugee families in Scotland. Based on Tudge's ecocultural theory, a qualitative case-study approach has been adopted. Semi-structured interviews have been conducted with volunteers who work with refugee families in a big city in Scotland, and proxy observations of young children were facilitated remotely by their refugee parents. A preliminary overview of the participants' insights of the use and role of technology for transitioning into a new culture is provided here. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI); HCI design and evaluation methods.

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