Research project Swedish tweenhoods. Between online and offline lives, inside and outside the school
This research project examines how pupils in the middle years of primary school (tweens) experience, negotiate, and ‘do’ childhood in their everyday lives, both online and offline, at school and during their leisure time.
For 10–12-year-olds, commonly referred to as tweens, online and offline worlds are deeply interconnected and inseparable from their everyday experiences, both within educational settings and beyond. This age group navigates a complex landscape where digital and physical spaces merge seamlessly, shaping how they form friendships, learn, play, and construct their identities. However, children's online lives are predominantly framed through the lens of risk in public discourse and policy debates, revealing significant frictions between adult anxieties and tweens' lived experiences. This risk-focused narrative often overshadows the nuanced ways in which tweens actively engage with and make meaning of their hybrid online-offline worlds.
To address a critical research gap and generate rich empirical knowledge about how tweenhood manifests in contemporary Swedish society, this project aims to examine how tweenhood is performed, negotiated, and experienced across online and offline contexts, both inside and outside educational institutions. The research team, comprising two established child and youth scholars with expertise in pedagogical practices and gender studies, alongside a postdoctoral researcher, will conduct an extensive 4-year ethnographic study that follows tweens through multiple contexts of their daily lives.
The fieldwork will take place in two selected schools, involving approximately 50 tweens from grades 4 and 6, representing diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and geographic locations. Beyond school observations, a smaller group of participants will be followed into their neighbourhoods, homes, recreational activities, and virtual spaces, enabling the research team to capture the continuities and discontinuities between different spheres of tweens' lives. The project will also include individual interviews, and focus group discussions with both tweens and their parents, complemented by systematic analysis of tween-oriented online content, social media platforms, and digital practices.
By synthesizing theoretical frameworks from child and youth studies, critical education research, and post-constructivist feminism, the project will generate novel insights into the interconnected nature of tweens’ online and offline lives, examining how experiences inside school shape and are shaped by activities outside school. This comprehensive approach will produce valuable knowledge about an often-overlooked and under-researched age group, with direct implications for improving pedagogical practices, developing age-appropriate support systems, and informing evidence-based policy decisions.
With explicit reference to contemporary debates about an accelerated Swedish childhood, where children are perceived to “grow older younger”, this research addresses a particularly pressing and timely concern. By centering tweens’ own perspectives and experiences, the study challenges deficit-based narratives and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of contemporary childhood in an increasingly digital society. While previous tweenhood studies have foremost focused on girls, the present project will broaden the understandings of tweenhood to both boys and girls, and highlight how cultural conceptions of tweenhood are connected to age, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity.
The project will contribute with an expansion of educational and childhood studies, to an age group that has previously been viewed as either children or youth, and highlight the specificities of being a tween. Not as in being in-between, but as in being right here, right now, in the middle of their own lives, as knowledgeable and agential. This is enabled by the close collaboration with the participating tweens through the ethnographic fieldwork, in local and situated contexts inside and outside of schools, online and offline. This will contribute with more affirmative, nuanced and child-oriented analyses, where the tweens themselves define what they experience in their own lives.