To research children, do you need to be a parent?

As school breaks for the summer, my children are experiencing that deep joy that can only come from the lure of six weeks of long summer days, the freedom to fill your day with everything or nothing, and a complete absence of timetables and structure! Thank goodness for self-employment as I can (mostly) enjoy that time with my children. But until I had children at school, I'd forgotten that feeling as I was caught up in the stickiness of summer tube journeys and the relentless plod of the company calendar. Now, when I conduct research with children, or ask parents questions about their children, my research is informed by my understanding of their world, a current working knowledge of Doc McStuffins and the Winx Club, and that awakening of my inner child – remember the first time you took your child to a soft play?! 

So the question I've been asking myself is: do you have to be a parent to be a good children’s researcher?

An Australian journal article (Butterworth & Murfin, 1999) described using children in the research process as a ‘troublesome method of collecting data’. The study described the process of recording ‘naturalistic play patterns’ but an anecdote was given about a child who bent down and said ‘hello’ into the lens and ‘boo’ on her return journey. The researchers reported: “On three separate occasions recording had to be discontinued for a period of one to three minutes because the presence of the video camera was interfering with one or two children's naturalistic play patterns.” My comment on reading this was that this was highly indicative of children’s naturalistic play patterns and inherent curiosity! The researchers didn’t comment whether they were parents or not but they certainly didn't understand children’s behaviour.

Another group of researchers (Harden, Scott, Backett-Milburn, & Jackson, 2000) wrote that two members of their team decided to opt out of interviewing children as they ‘did not have the necessary skills and attributes’ as childless women with no experience of interviewing under 14s. At the end of the study, they reflected on this issue and felt that they should have thought more carefully about their ‘own and wider social assumptions in this context’.

Elton-Chalcraft, 2011, says that she took on the role of ‘traveller’ and the ‘least-adult’ in her research with school children encouraging the children to tell her their stories and engaging them in conversation. Swain, 2005 benefited from his experience as an ex-primary school teacher when he conducted research with boys in a junior school. He felt if he lost their respect, it would have an adverse effect on data quality. “I did not let the children lean back on their chairs or put their feet up on the table, and I would also admonish them if they openly used swear words out of the context of their account.” Although he adopted a least-adult and least-teacher stance, his experience in education helped him to give the children a platform to talk while keeping focused on his areas of questioning.

Academic literature advocates this ‘least-adult’ approach allowing children to be their own person and speak for themselves. To get the best from them, researchers need to understand children, design data collection around their patterns of behaviour, genuinely have a respect for their opinions, and certainly to have had good contact with children whether that’s as a parent, god-parent, relative, friend, teacher or club leader.

Failing that, children’s researchers need to dig deep and rediscover their inner child so roll down a hill, build a sandcastle, make a kite, learn how to make loom band bracelets... The summer holidays are here!