Researching Children's Experience: Approaches and Methods

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 15 No. 2 (2005) ISSN: 1546-2250 Researching Children’s Experience: Approaches and Methods Greene, S. and Hogan, D. (2005). London: Sage; 284 pages. $37.95. ISBN 0761971033. This edited volume will benefit academics and practitioners in many child-related disciplines including childhood studies, health, social care, education, sociology and psychology. It will be particularly useful for post-graduate students engaged in research with children. Apart from one or two dense chapters, the content is readily accessible to this wide audience. The two editors have a wealth of experience of research with children, the first editor being the Director of the Children’s Research Centre at Trinity College, Dublin and the second editor, being a senior research fellow in the same center. They come from the very different backgrounds of developmental psychology and sociology, and some of the inherent tensions between these two approaches are explored in the book. Individual chapters are authored by international experts, with a good balance between weighty academics and active 439 researchers. A disappointment is that all the authors come from Europe or the United States so that we do not have an opportunity to learn about the experiences of researchers involved with children in majority world countries. Even a single chapter would have been a rich addition to the volume. The book explores issues involved in researching children’s experience. This theme is approached in three parts: a section addressing conceptual, methodological and ethical issues; a section examining methods for undertaking research with children; and a section focusing on the generation and analysis of child-sourced text. In addressing these issues, the editors underline the importance of children’s perspectives and children’s voice throughout and are reflexive about the tensions and dilemmas posed. Indeed, the questioning of assumptions about children’s experience and children’s perspectives is a central focus of the book. After an introductory chapter scoping the book, the second chapter examines researching children’s experience from the approach of developmental psychology. This chapter openly critiques some earlier developmental psychology research and discusses the impact of perspectives such as the “new sociology of childhood” which orients itself in a sociocontextual framework. At the same time, Hogan defends what is valuable in developmental psychology research—especially the current, more reflexive perspective psychologists are adopting, making the point that much would be lost if “the baby was thrown out with the bath water.” The final section advocates a reconciling of competing approaches. This chapter is followed by one positing the sociological perspective where Christensen and Prout raise conceptual inconsistencies around socially constructed phenomena, for example questioning the notion that children are a homogeneous group and whether childhood can be viewed as an analytical category. The first part of the final chapter looks at ethical considerations. While there is little new here, it offers a very comprehensive and lively discussion around competency and power issues and 440 brings together all the salient ethical points. The final bulleted summary will be particularly useful. Part 2 is more practical and will be particularly useful to active researchers. It explores three approaches to observation of children: naturalistic, ecological and ethnographic. It was refreshing to find Tudge and Hogan, in their ecological chapter, defending the use of real-time observation and discussing the limitations of the video camera compared to the range and responsiveness of the human eye. While the chapters in this section are engaging and useful, I would have liked to see more reflexivity expressed around the chosen methods and more awareness of the “interpretive” nature of adult observations and an acknowledgement of some inevitable “adult filtering.” Part 3 is rather more dense and less accessible than the other two parts, although the content is interesting and relevant. It examines meaning and interpretation in the generation of data through interviews with children and focuses on narrative analysis from the perspectives of discourse, interpretive poetics, story telling and phenomenology. The last two chapters take the reader from theory back to practice with a more “how to do” feel on focus group interviews and creative participatory research. This is a timely publication when attention is being more closely focused on children’s perspectives...