Researching Children′s Experience

Approaches and Methods

Sheila Greene, Diane Hogan, Sheila Greene, Diane Hogan

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780761971030, 9780761971023
• eBook ISBN: 9781446229071
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

`Strongly recommended as it provides a very useful overview of a range of methods, mainly textual, for exploring children?s experiences. These accounts are placed well in the broader conceptual frameworks concerning both methodologies and ethical considerations? - Educational Review

How should the researcher approach the sensitive subject of the child? What are the ethical issues involved in researching children?s experiences? In essays written by a collection of key, international authors, Researching Children?s Experience addresses these questions, and examines up-to-date methodological and conceptual approaches to researching children. This book is a practical, comprehensive and interdisciplinary guide for advanced students and researchers, exploring a range of studies, and the theoretical and ethical motivations behind them.

The book is divided into three coherent sections:

- Conceptual, methodological and ethical issues in researching children?s experiences.

- Methods for conducting research with children.

- The generation and analysis of text.

Researching Children?s Experience provides examples of how researchers from a variety of social science perspectives have set about carrying out research into children?s experience. Useful to students embarking on a research project, and to experienced researchers wishing to explore new methods, Greene and Hogan?s book is an essential addition to anyone doing research on children. It will be especially useful to those in developmental psychology, education, nursing and other disciplines interested in studying children?s experience.

Conceptual, Methodological and Ethical Issues in Researching Children’s Experience

PART ONE

1	Researching Children’s Experience: Methods and Methodological Issues
	Sheila Greene and Malcolm Hill

Why Research Children’s Experience?

As one looks from an historical perspective at the vast field of social scientific, empirical research already conducted on and with children, it is evident that the predominant emphasis has been on children as the objects of research rather than children as subjects, on child-related outcomes rather than child-related processes and on child variables rather than children as persons.

The chapters by Hogan, and by Christensen and Prout in this book (Chapters 2 and 3 respectively) outline the assumptions held by psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists about children that shaped the approach taken by these disciplines for much of the twentieth century. Both chapters also describe the shift in emphasis and ideology which has become known as ‘the new social studies of childhood’. As Hogan outlines, similar critiques of the dominant perspective on child development research have become evident amongst psychologists, although mainstream developmental psychology tends to be somewhat more wedded to traditional epistemologies than appears to be the case amongst contemporary sociologists and anthropologists, or indeed, other disciplines like geography and history (Holloway & Valentine, 2000).

This chapter is written by two people with different disciplinary backgrounds – developmental and clinical psychology (Greene) and social work and social research (Hill). Despite this difference in background and perspective, we share an interest in conducting research that helps us to understand more about children’s experience of their worlds. This is not an easy task: there are many questions and pitfalls that can trouble the researcher in this area.

The impetus to set out to understand and describe children’s experience may reflect one or more of a range of different commitments as a researcher. First, it may reflect an interest in experience itself. According to William James, ‘individual experience defines the scope of psychology’ (1990 [1890]: 361). Yet very few psychologists these days would agree with James on the centrality of experience. In fact, the idea that individual experience is central to psychology has come under siege from many quarters. For example, it does not accord with the desire on the part of twentieth-century mainstream psychology to identify itself as a science, in the very traditional sense of that term.

From the sociological perspective, experience, as a term, has been one that is relegated to the realm of the psychological. It is a phenomenon that does not fit with the sociological emphasis on social forces and factors as the causes of human activity (Giddens, 1989). Susan Oyama (1993) points out that both sociology and anthropology fought for a long time to replace psychological determinism with sociocultural determinism – although it must be said that this has been modified by the recent emphasis on the part of Giddens and others on the importance of individual agency. In fact, with a few exceptions, such as psychoanalysis, many contemporary psychologists eschew ‘psychological’ explanations, feeling much more comfortable with biological rather than psychological determinism. However, both socio-cultural determinism and biological determinism avoid the psychological and serve to obliterate the person as agent and as experiencing subject.

Recent movements, such as social constructionism, the social scientific wing of postmodernism, have also played their part in undermining any claim that we can or should place experience at the centre of our interests. Where there is an attack on the notion of the unitary self, an attack on the notion of individual experience cannot be far behind. If there is no self, who is the experiencer?

On the other hand, one might well argue that the nature of children’s experience is of great interest to social science. It is, for example, very open to a developmental analysis. When do children begin to recognize that they have an internal representation of the world, which is private to them? Do young children experience their worlds via pictures, feelings or words? How do adults assist and shape the experiential life of young children? The active role that children play in constructing their own developmental story is increasingly recognized and calls out for a methodology that assists us in accessing and understanding children’s experiential life.

Jerome Kagan has commented that, ‘The person’s interpretation of experience is simultaneously the most significant product of an encounter and the spur to the next’ (1984: 279). It can be argued that without some kind of access to the content of a person’s experience, we have a very incomplete account, from a scientific perspective, of what it is that causes any person, adult or child, to act as they do.

Second, aside from an interest in experience itself, research into children’s experience can reflect an interest in the study of children as persons rather than study of the child that is carried out in order to advance our understanding of human psychology in general. Studying children as persons implies a view of children as sentient beings who can act with intention and as agents in their own lives. An interest in researching children’s experience can, therefore, be allied to a moral perspective on the role and status of children which respects and promotes their entitlement to being considered as persons of value and persons with rights. The focus shifts thereby to studying children and not child variables. The child as an experiencing subject is a person whose experience and whose response to that experience are of interest to themselves, to other children and to adults. In Chapter 3 of this volume, Christensen and Prout talk about conferring on children and childhood ‘a sense of present value’. Children in most societies are valued for their potential and for what they will grow up to be but are devalued in terms of their present perspectives and experiences.

The researcher who values children’s perspectives and wishes to understand their lived experience will be motivated to find out more about how children understand and interpret, negotiate and feel about their daily lives. If we accept a view of children as persons, the nature of children’s experiential life becomes of central interest.

In recent years, children’s right to be considered as persons has been voiced publicly in a number of different fora. Vindication of this right underpins the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), the Children Act (1989) in the UK and The National Children’s Strategy (2000) in Ireland. The seeds were sown for the recognition of children’s right to be heard in the 1960s and 1970s, a time of social upheaval in the West when the voices of marginalized groups such as women and ethnic minorities surfaced and changed the political landscape. An interest in children as marginalized people could be seen as part of this larger movement. Within the social sciences, a new interest in children’s experience and perspectives was fueled by the alignment of researchers with this moral and political perspective on children’s position in the world (see for example, Qvortrup, Bordy, Sgitha, & Wintersberger, 1994). Furthermore, the demand on the part of policy makers and practitioners to have ways of accessing the child’s perspective and giving voice to children has also led to a pragmatic interest among researchers in the development of appropriate methods (Davie, 1993; Davie, Upton, & Varma, 1996).

Third, researching children’s experience is premised on the view that children are not all the same. It resists the idea that what we are setting out to research is ‘the child’ and replaces this piece of automatic discourse – very central to the practice of developmental psychology in particular – with the recognition that children encounter their worlds in an individual and idiosyncratic manner and that their worlds are themselves all different. The longstanding lack of recognition of one major distinction, that of gender, led Ennew to comment on the existence of ‘that strange ungendered isolate, the child’ (Ennew, 1994). Clearly numerous other distinctions also apply. Setting out to research children’s experience implies a respect for each child as a unique and valued experiencer of his or her world. It also demands the use of methods that can capture the nature of children’s lives as lived rather than those that rely on taking children out of their everyday lives into a professional’s office or ‘lab’.

Recognition of children’s diversity and individuality has implications for research methodology. Developmental psychology has had and continues to have a fascination with statistics and with attempting to draw conclusions about ‘the child’ by combining measures of some particular behaviour of a large group of children. In an interesting review of a book by Cairns, Bergman and Kagan, Methods and models for studying the individual (1998), Ingrid Josephs repeats the guiding question for the eleven chapters of the book. ‘How can the richness of individual lives be captured by the objective methods and statistical analyses of developmental research?’ After reviewing the book, Josephs concludes, ‘the answer is simple “It cannot be captured at all!”’ (p. 475). Perhaps there is an unresolvable struggle between the desire for so-called objectivity and the wish to understand children and how they lead their lives.

We both subscribe to the view that the understanding of children, their lives and their development requires a multiplicity of methodological approaches. The method selected should fit the question that is asked. If the focus of enquiry is on the quality of individual lives, statistical methods are not the method of choice since statistics serve to obliterate individuality and richness. The richness of an individual’s life is very often not to be found in the surface of life but in how it is lived, in the person’s experiences and reactions to the world. On the other hand, if we want to know how many children in a particular population have experienced the death of a parent we must collect the appropriate statistics.

What is Meant by ‘Experience’?

At this point it might be useful to ask what one means when one uses the word ‘experience’. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary gives various definitions of experience. The most relevant from our perspective is perhaps the definition of experience as, ‘The fact of being consciously the subject of a state or condition or of being consciously affected by an event. Also an instance of this.’ By this definition, consciousness is a requisite for experience. The definition implies that those who experience are conscious of being the subject of a state/condition or the effects of an event. By this token, one might ask whether pre-verbal children can be said with confidence to have experiences since they cannot report on them in a self-conscious manner. That a young child has experiences of the world is an inference, which we make when and if we attribute consciousness to infants. This becomes relevant to the researcher who claims an interest in researching the experience of infants and young children via observation.

Sociocultural perspectives on the construction of self suggest persuasively that how we relate to the world is very largely a function of the cultural context, particularly, those discourses which are central to structuring the world and the individual’s place in it. Thus, children come to think of themselves as selves and interpret their encounters with self, the world and others in very different ways depending on the discourses that are dominant in their culture. Scheiffelin and Ochs (1998) describe the radically different attributions made by the Kaluli people in Papua New Guinea and the US and British middle classes about how infants relate to the world and how they should be treated. The Kaluli people assume that babies ‘have no understanding’ and do not address them or treat them as communicative partners. By contrast, in the middle-class homes of the USA and Britain ‘from birth on, the infant is treated as a social being and as an addressee in social interaction’ (p. 51). Where in many western cultures parents spend a lot of time interpreting the baby’s behaviour and their underlying mood states, preferences, and so on, the Kaluli people show ‘a cultural dispreference for talking about or making claims about what another might think, what another might do, or what another is about to do, especially if there is no external evidence’ (p. 56). Thus the child is socialized into a mode of relating to her/himself and others that is very specific to his or her culture. The interest that we show in some parts of the West in the inner experience of others, even of babies, is not a universal phenomenon. Interest in, and interpretation of, experience is also likely to vary in important ways from culture to culture. How we value and speak about experience is then, in large part, a function of a culturally specific process.

In western cultures the observer of children tends to assume that their activity and verbalizations are products of, or in some essential way connected to, the child’s experience. However, the nature of any child’s (or adult’s) experience is always in part inaccessible to an outsider: this must be a fundamental premise for the researcher. This inaccessibility is even more problematic when children are as yet unable to report on their conscious encounters with the world. We will leave aside for the moment the capacity of even very young children to deceive.

The inaccessibility of experience might be assumed to be total if experience is seen as essentially private. However most contemporary understandings of experience, since the time of John Dewey at least, would see experience as socially mediated and therefore, in some essentials, shared. Experience is interpretative and the medium by which humans interpret their encounters with the world is linguistic or at least symbolic. From a discourse theory perspective, our experience is constituted by the discourses that are available to us (see, for example, Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn, & Walkerdine, 1984). While recognizing the importance of discourse in creating meaning, to conclude that experience is entirely constituted by discourse is going a step too far since it negates the material and sensational foundation of some forms of experience, for example, the abscess that causes a pain in one’s jaw.

Experience is about interpretation, on the part of the self to the self (as in reflexive mental processes) and on the part of the self to others (as in attempts to communicate experience) and, further, on the part of the others as they attempt to understand the original experience. The latter exchange has been encompassed in the term ‘intersubjectivity’, that process which occurs in exchange between two or more subjectivities. This dialectic process applies not only to the development of meaning in children’s daily lives, but also to the encounters by which researchers seek to understand children’s experiences.

Researching children’s experience is a project that is fundamentally problematic. The process is highly inferential. We assume that it is possible to learn about children’s experience both by enquiry into their active engagement with their material and social worlds, whether the focus is on actions or words, and from their own reports on their subjective world. Thus, observational studies may give us an entré...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part One: Conceptual, methodological and ethical issues in researching children’s experience
• Part Two: Methods for conducting research with children
• Part Three: The generation and analysis of text
• Index