Researching Children’s

Lives

Researching Children’s

Lives

Who’s studying children?

Children’s real behavior

vs.

What they interpret to be preferred behavior

“Legitimate adult-child interaction depends on

adult authority.”

Just as there are several distinct theoretical perspectives used in explaining children’s experiences, several distinct methodological approaches also exist for researching children’s lives – and all involve ethical issues.

Theories&

METHODS

ExperimentsSurveysInterviewsEthnographyOther Methods

ResearChApproaches:

Informed Consent:• Parental consent• Child assent

Review Protocols:• Description of Research• Description of subjects• Description of benefits and risks

ETHICS OF RESEARCH with CHILDREN

Issues of Age & Development

Access

Roles (Supervisor? Leader? Observer? Friend?)

EXPERIMENTS

Researchers routinely use experimental designs to evaluate children’s development and

performance, to decide whether specific social conditions are harmful, and to determine the

success of intervention programs.

EXPERIMENTS

Goal: Control Setting, test interventions

Focus: Individual differences among

children

Concealment and deception are

common practices

Experiments Involve...

Hypothesis: Changing family process leads to decreased symptoms in the children.

Mediating variables: parental demoralization, parental warmth, stable

positive events and negative stress events in the family

Findings: Interventions were successful for older children, but not for younger children

– Sandler et al., 1992

Experiments in

Mediating Children’s

Grief

Survey research on children has often been carried out

with parents about children.

SURVEYSSURVEYS

Questionnaires or Interviews

Sampling and Statistical Controls

Issues of Privacy, Confidentiality, and Parental Influence

SURVEY RESEARCH InvolveS...

Semi-structured interviews with children at 4 months, 1 year, and 2 years after death

of a parent

Surveys using Competence Scale and and Locus of

Control Scale

Findings challenge traditional ideas about children’s grief being expressed through

periods of prolonged crying, aggression, or withdrawal and

creating family dysfunction

– Silverman and Worden, 1992

SURVEYS OF

Children’s Grief

ETHNOGRAPHY

Ethnography has been developed with the goal of acquainting the researcher with a

culture or subculture and in recording and interpreting the everyday life of a group “on

their grounds and on their terms.”

ETHNOGRAPHY

Goal: Understand children’s culture!s"

Focus: Access, acceptance, and determining limits

Authority, Adult-as-Friend’, or ‘Least Adult’?

ETHNOGRAPHIES WITH CHILDREN

Involve...

Deliberately refrain from formulating hypotheses

Collect drawings and comments on death from

over 300 children, ages 4-19

Findings: Younger children provide “immature”

representations of death; grade school children present emotions, beliefs, and ritual; adolescents focus on the

“essence of death.”

– Wenestam & Wass, 1987

ETHNOGRAPHIES OF

Children’s Grief

The Private Worlds of Dying Children

Myra Bluebond-Langner, 1978

With The Boys: Little League Baseball and

Preadolescent Culture

Gary Alan Fine, 1987

Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School

Barrie Thorne, 1993

We’re Friends, Right? Inside Kids’ Culture

William Corsaro, 2003

Other Methods

Demographic StudiesCritical Feminist Methodology

Multi-Method Approaches

Other Methods

Last Question:

Can adults ever really study children’s lives in

a valid way?

Adult Biases:Children as unfinished products

Children’s knowledge judged as flawed or unreliable

Cultural Biases:Validating children’s

perspectives may be negatively

sanctioned

If we proceed from the standpoint that “child” is a socially constructed category, then we can examine the expectations of the child category and how these expectations shape

children’s lived experiences.

Suspending the ‘Adult’ role

Giving up authority and privilege

Treating ‘child’ and ‘adult’ as socially constructed categories

Suspending adult-centric biases

Recognizing our own limitations of understanding

THANK YOU.