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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.

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.

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.

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.

Attending to how one “constructs” the child may usefully inform debates about the harmfulness or usefulness of goods and messages directed to children.

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.

The purpose of the paper is to explore how discourses of children's empowerment through goods have emerged and function as a key narrative among many in children's commercial industries, particularly in the USA and Canada.

The central philosophical and theoretical approach guiding this inquiry rests on the notion that the “child consumer” exists as a rhetorical figure which has an existence that is as consequential as “real,” biographical children. The child consumer arises from, and in many ways resides in, discourses produced by marketers, retailers, researchers and advertisers on the pages of marketing publications, often framing the imaginations and guiding the actions of advertisers, retailers, merchandisers and marketers. Articles from trade publications such as AdWeek, BrandWeek, Brandmarketing; KidScreen and Progressive Grocer, in addition to books written by marketers about the children's market since the 1990s, were examined.

Three key themes – choice, recognition and involvement – were found to be the most prominent in framing children's consumption as “empowering.”

For scholars and practitioners, the paper offers an approach to understand corporate practice as moral practice by highlighting the ideological justifications presented in defense of promoting children's consumption in the last decade. It offers a cautionary tale about the power of capital to produce and deploy social meaning.

The purpose of this paper is to understand, from children's perspectives, the commercial marketing strategy of selling breakfast cereals with “insert toys” targeted at children.

The study is based on four focus group interviews conducted with 16 children (8‐9 years of age) concerning 18 different breakfast cereal packages. The theoretical framework integrates childhood sociology, critical discourse analysis and talk‐in‐interaction. This theoretical and methodological combination is used to show how children, in local micro settings of talk, make use of the discourses that are available to them to produce and reproduce social and cultural values about marketing with “insert toys”.

The present findings suggest that, from children's perspectives, “insert toys” are constituted by cultural and social patterns extending far beyond the “insert toy” itself. For example, the analysis shows that it is not biological age that defines what and how consumption is understood.

The focus group material provides understandings of marketing strategies and consumption practices from children's perspectives. When the children talk about children and adults, hybrid agents of the “child‐adult”, the “adult‐child” and the “childish child” are constructed. These hybrids contradict research that dichotomizes children and adults likewise children's understandings of consumption based on age stages. Accordingly, age is rationalized into an empirically investigated category rather than being used as a preset category set out to explain children's behaviours.

Analysis of the focus group interactions shows that the way the market and marketing as well as children and adults are talked about is crucial to understanding children's and parents' actions as consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how young people as consumers are using one particular social networking site (Bebo), and how these young consumers are engaging with discourses which position them variously as vulnerable to online risk and as members of the knowledgeable “net generation”.

The article provides an in‐depth analysis of data collected from 24 Bebo participants, ages 14‐16, focusing mainly on interviews. Discourse analysis is used to uncover the ways that the participants in the study position themselves in relation to discourses surrounding teenagers as consumers on social networking sites.

The analysis demonstrates that teenagers are using Bebo in very specific ways as part of a range of modes of communication with different audiences. Often their use of Bebo is quite banal, highlighting the possibility that adults (parents, researchers, government, NGOs) over‐invest in the meaning of Bebo for young teens. However, typical of the tensions involved in people's subject positioning, the interviewees also indicate that Bebo is serving particular purposes in relation to their identities as teenagers. Therefore, the article considers dimensions of the “life stage” of adolescence as a way of understanding the significance of Bebo in teenagers' lives.

The article provides an in‐depth analysis of qualitative data related to a small age‐range of consumers on a specific social networking site. This focus highlights the specificity of Bebo as a social networking site, as well as the particular ways that these 14‐16 year olds engage with various technologies and discursive practices surrounding young consumers online.

The purpose of this paper is to propose the activity‐based focus group as a useful method with which to generate talk‐in‐interaction among pre‐schoolers. Analytically, it aims to illustrate how transcribed talk‐in‐interaction can be subjected to a discourse analytic lens, to produce insights into how pre‐schoolers use “Coca‐Cola” as a conversational resource with which to build product‐related meanings and social selves.

Fourteen activity‐based discussion groups with pre‐schoolers aged between two and five years have been conducted in a number of settings including privately run Montessori schools and community based preschools in Dublin. The talk generated through these groups has been transcribed using the conventions of conversation analysis (CA). Passages of talk characterized by the topic of Coca‐Cola were isolated and a sub‐sample of these are analysed here using a CA‐informed discourse analytic approach.

A number of linguistic repertoires are drawn on, including health, permission and age. Coca‐Cola is constructed as something which is “bad” and has the potential to make one “mad”. It is an occasion‐based product permitted by parents for example as a treat, at the cinema or at McDonalds. It can be utilised to build “age‐based” social selves. “Big” boys or girls can drink Coca‐Cola but it is not suitable for “babies”.

This paper provides insight into the use of the activity‐based focus group as a data generation tool for use with pre‐schoolers. A discourse analytic approach to the interpretation of children's talk‐in‐interaction suggests that the preschool consumer is competent in accessing and employing a consumer artefact such as Coca‐Cola as a malleable resource with which to negotiate product meanings and social selves.

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Advances in Econometrics is a series of research volumes first published in 1982 by JAI Press. The authors present an update to the history of the Advances in Econometrics series. The initial history, published in 2012 for the 30th Anniversary Volume, describes key events in the history of the series and provides information about key authors and contributors to Advances in Econometrics. The authors update the original history and discuss significant changes that have occurred since 2012. These changes include the addition of five new Senior Co-Editors, seven new AIE Fellows, an expansion of the AIE conferences throughout the United States and abroad, and the increase in the number of citations for the series from 7,473 in 2012 to over 25,000 by 2022.