Research proposal

Kidfluencers
What influence do foreign YouTube kidinfluencers have on Lithuanian children?
This topic is interesting because nowadays, more and more children are using social media at a
very young age, influencing something or just following others and it has a huge impact on them.
Through the creation of content for websites and apps like TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and
Facebook, influencers today are generating millions of views, double taps and comments (Katreen
Dale, 2022). For instance, these days, anyone may generate material and engage in social networks
like YouTube (Karenina and Luthfia, 2019), which brings video bloggers closer to the public and
pushes the boundaries of intimacy and privacy (Regueira et al., 2020). Especially, kidinfluencers do
not know the consequences of filming everything and uploading it on social media. For example, at
six years old, Ryan of Ryan Toys Review was named "the youngest member of Forbes’ World’s
Highest-Paid YouTube Stars for 2017" making an estimated $11 million in 2016 (Forbes 2017).
Thus, they can get hate from followers or subscribers, or they can already be making money and
get a lot of attention from others at a very young age. On the other hand, those who are watching
these kids just see videos of happy lives without any problems. Children's brains and bodies are
developing, so they copy without thinking, believe everything others say, and become like a flock
of sheep; they also lack a critical sense and their own opinion. Well, many aspects of kidinfluencers
are decently analyzed, but there is an unresolved question: What influence do foreign YouTube
kidinfluencers have on Lithuanian children?
The following research questions will be raised in order to analyze the impact international
YouTube kidinfluencers have on youth in Lithuania:
1. How does watching kidfluencers' YouTube videos change a child's schedule and free time in
Lithuania?
2. What do Lithuanian young people think about the money made through social media abroad?
A tried-and-true method, an online survey, will be used to gather a variety of data. The survey will
be created using Google Forms and it will require the respondents to state their age, gender,
nationality, education level, etc. When filling out the survey, people will have the opportunity to
answer "yes" or "no" questions, and there will be some open-ended questions. Both young
(between ages 6-16 and 16-26) and older (between ages 26-36 and 36-46) adults will participate in
the research. Furthermore, contributors will have a choice between an English and a Lithuanian
version of the online survey because possibly the majority of very young and elderly people do not
understand English clearly. There will be about 200 (two hundred) people needed for this study.
Moreover, information will be collected over a three-week period. Therefore, it is this type of
research that will help to answer the questions that are relevant to examining the topic of the work.
For the required data, the qualitative content analysis method will be used. Qualitative research is
more subjective and uses data that is not number-based, so it will be focused on the words and
ideas of the participants in the research. Furthermore, this method will help better understand the
survey participants' point of view on this matter. A research technique called content analysis will
be used to find specific words, themes, or concepts in a given set of qualitative data.
In conclusion, this research will be unique because it has not been done in Lithuania yet. In
addition, it will be about an increasingly popular thing on social media: kidinfluencers, who have
an effect on young people's lives. Thus, this study will touch human beings of different ages and
help them understand the impact of kidinfluencers on YouTube on them, their children, or their
grandchildren. As a result, this research will help find the answers to the questions raised, and the
outcome will be influenced by public opinion.
REFERENCES:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844020318995
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/
338713508_Women_on_YouTube_Representation_and_participation_through_the_Web_Scraping
_technique
https://theinfluenceagency.com/blog/famous-kid-youtubers/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00913367.2018.1544952?
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