Is Children's Independent Mobility Really Independent? A Study of Children's Mobility Combining Ethnography and GPS/Mobile Phone Technologies1

Abstract

This article proposes the need for a critical examination of the notion of children's ‘independent mobility’, a concept rather uncritically accepted by social science and human geography research. It examines the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of the concept by drawing on data from a study of children's mobility in a suburban area of Copenhagen and two villages in Jutland, Denmark. The study combined ethnography with GPS‐tracking and a rolling mobile phone survey. This produced a rich data set that allows us to show that children's mobility has to be recognized as primarily social, and that companionship pervades every aspect of the activity. The findings suggest that researchers need to attend to the diversity of children's mobility patterns, the local geographical contexts of children's movements and the different relations of interdependency that children's mobility involves.