ABSTRACT
Children’s Childhoods: Observed and Experienced-the title of this bookdraws attention to a range of possibilities for exploring childhood and to the wide-ranging focus of the chapters collected here. Between them, the authors are concerned to study such topics as: to what extent childhood belongs to children-or to adults; whether children’s understanding of childhood can serve as a basis for reconstructing childhood; whether the development of a sociology of childhood is, can be and should be for children or for adults; what contributions can be made by adult observation and study of children to understanding childhood; what are the methodological and ethical issues intrinsic to collecting data from and with children and to providing accounts based on the data.
