Topic 5 - Research Methods for Studying Children
-
Upload
daniel-bigler -
Category
Education
-
view
1.548 -
download
1
Transcript of Topic 5 - Research Methods for Studying Children
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.