Hill, Jennifer Ann. 2011. “Endangered Childhoods: How Consumerism is Impacting Child and Youth Identity.” Media, Culture & Society 33 (3): 347-362. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.redlands.edu/10.1177/0163443710393387. http://ezproxy.redlands.edu/docview/1928299552?accountid=14729.

For the last research exercise, I wanted to find research that more closely relates to the final reseach question that I have been tweaking for the last few weeks. My article for this assignment is called Endangered Childhoods: How Consumerism is Impacting Child and Youth Identity and it was found through ProQuest.

This article discusses the extensive presence of consumerism in children’s lives, using information and data from a plethora of previous research conducted From a very young age, children are bombarded with advertisements and images displaying consumer products, encouraging them to buy them or beg their parents to. Due to this, children’s identities are created and affected by the ways in which they consume. The author’s purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of consumerism, in order to assess identity formation and development in youth. This articles topic is about the lasting effects that consumerism has on children’s identities, and the research question is “In what ways does consumerism affect youth identity in the United States?” The type of data needed to answer this question would be acts of behavior and events. However, this author did not conduct her own research and instead used existing research from other authors. The author use meta-analyis to collect information from various studies to create a more compelling argument. The method of data analysis is both qualitative and quantitative, because there was numerical and non-numerical data assessed in the report.

I think this author used compelling evidence from a multitude of studies, and the article itself is published in a legitimate journal. The author cited about 51 sources, which indicates to me that she thoroughly inspected existing research and is very educated on this topic. I think if the author conducted her own research, perhaps her evidence would be a little more updated and accurate, as some of the research cited is slightly dated. The most interesting part of this article for me was learning how much time and resources companies spend on advertisements geared towards children. Companies are focused on “cradle-to-grave” marketing which means they begin gearing advertisements towards children early on, in order to create and ensure brand loyalty in the future.