Doing Research with Children and Young People

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 15 No. 1 (2005) ISSN: 1546-2250 Doing Research with Children and Young People Fraser, Sandy and Lewis, Vicky and Ding, Sharon (2004). London: Sage Publications; 294 pages. $39.95. ISBN 0761943811. The past decade or so has witnessed a dramatic shift in our collective view of children and young people. Indeed, the problematic phrase “our collective view” now prompts reflection on the Western (minority world) versus non-Western (majority world) understanding of the nature and meaning of childhood. In current research practice, children and young people are no longer thought of as passive objects of scientific study or as merely indicators of intervention effects. Falling generally under the rubric “the new sociology of childhood,” this transdisciplinary movement is rooted in a sustained critique of scientific methods of understanding children and childhood, and has been particularly focused on challenging the laboratory-based experimental models and quantitative methods that dominate fields such as psychology. Your reaction to this last statement will likely predict your response to Doing Research with Children and Young People. For some readers, the contributed chapters may seem just another salvo from the social constructivists, aimed at undermining positivist claims of research objectivity and generalizable truth. Others, like me, will welcome this collection, and its companion volume, The Reality of Research with Children and Young People (Lewis et al. 2004), as long overdue accounts of reflective research practice with children and young people. As Vicky Lewis writes in her introductory chapter, the editors set two broad goals for the volume. One was to identify and reflect on the many issues arising out of research with children and young people. These include broad concerns such as ethics, power relations and the characteristics of respectful practice, but also how particular research frameworks shape not just the observer and the observed, but exert an often unacknowledged influence on research outcomes. Building on this awareness, the second goal was to help 377 consumers of research question what they read by critically examining the products of research through the lens of reflective practice. Although the book is not a research methods book, in the sense of “how to do” research, it certainly takes as its focus the issues affecting choices of research questions, data collection and analysis, and dissemination of results. It is therefore an indispensable addition to more systematic research methods texts. The 18 chapters of Doing Research with Children and Young People are organized into four thematic sections. The first section, “Setting the Context,” includes chapters on the changing nature of empirical research, the changing nature of childhood, the changing legal context of research with children (limited to the UK context) and ends with a discussion of the scientific paradigm of empirical research and its post-structuralist and social constructivist challengers. Together these chapters provide an historical account of changes in research theory and practice and in particular set the context for the transformation from doing research on to Doing Research with Children and Young People. The next section, “Research Relations,” brings together four chapters focused on issues arising from the relations between the researcher and the researched. These include the role of ethics (as understood separately from legal considerations—not everything that is legal, we are told, is ethical), power relations, gender relations and participation. Emerging from the general critique of scientific research on human subjects, these chapters reflect a growing sensitivity to the power relations between adult researchers and children and young people as subjects of research. The third section, “Diversity,” includes chapters that each explore the social construction of a particular category of research subject through the lens of age, gender, ethnicity, race and disability. Although each is treated separately, the authors stress the fact that children construct intersecting identities across multiple categories. In addition, children’s identities are not formed or practiced in isolation, but are produced within the many social relations in which they are a part, including families, peers and other social groups. More important for researchers, perhaps, are the implications of 378 these multiple identities for research practice. In particular we are reminded to consider our own gendered, aged, and racialized positions and to be aware of how the...