1. Researching
Children’s
Lives

3. Who’s studying
children?

4. Children’s real behavior
vs.
What they interpret to be
preferred behavior

5. “Legitimate adult-child
interaction depends on
adult authority.”

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

7. Experiments
ResearCh
Surveys
Approaches:
Interviews
Ethnography
Other Methods

8. ETHICS OF RESEARCH
with CHILDREN
Informed Consent: Issues of Age &
•
Parental consent Development
•
Child assent
Review Protocols:
•
Description of Research
•
Description of subjects
•
Description of benefits and risks

9. Access
Roles
(Supervisor? Leader?
Observer? Friend?)

10. 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.

11. Goal: Control
Experiments Setting, test
Involve... interventions
Focus: Individual
differences among
children
Concealment and
deception are
common practices

12. Hypothesis: Changing family
Experiments in process leads to decreased
Mediating symptoms in the children.
Mediating variables:
Children’s parental demoralization,
Grief 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

13. SURVEYS
Survey research on children
has often been carried out
with parents about children.

14. Questionnaires or
SURVEY Interviews
RESEARCH Sampling and
InvolveS... Statistical Controls
Issues of Privacy,
Confidentiality, and
Parental Influence

15. Semi-structured interviews
SURVEYS OF with children at 4 months, 1
Children’s year, and 2 years after death
of a parent
Grief 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

16. 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.”

17. ETHNOGRAPHIES Goal: Understand
children’s culture(s)
WITH CHILDREN
Focus: Access,
Involve... acceptance, and
determining limits
Authority,
Adult-as-Friend’,
or ‘Least Adult’?

18. Deliberately refrain from
ETHNOGRAPHIES OF formulating hypotheses
Children’s Collect drawings and
comments on death from
Grief 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

19. The Private Worlds of
Dying Children
Myra Bluebond-Langner,
1978

20. With The Boys: Little
League Baseball and
Preadolescent Culture
Gary Alan Fine, 1987

21. Gender Play: Girls and
Boys in School
Barrie Thorne, 1993

22. We’re Friends, Right?
Inside Kids’ Culture
William Corsaro, 2003

23. Other Methods
Demographic Studies
Critical Feminist Methodology
Multi-Method Approaches

24. Last Question:

25. Can adults ever really
study children’s lives in
a valid way?

26. Adult Biases: Cultural
Children as Biases:
unfinished Validating
products children’s
perspectives may
Children’s be negatively
knowledge judged sanctioned
as flawed or
unreliable

27. 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.

28. 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

29. THANK YOU.