ABSTRACT
This book has been some time in the making. Leena Alanen and Berry Mayall first began to plan it in early 1996 when they were both working at the Department of Child Studies, Linköping University in Sweden. Their discussions grew out of their previous work; Leena had taken part in the Nordic One Parent study, Berry in UK studies on children’s lives at home and school. They shared an interest in the work of the Childhood as a Social Phenomenon project-Leena had worked on the Finnish report (Alanen and Bardy 1990). Out of these discussions came the idea for a book which drew on studies from a range of societies, both majority and minority, where a common thread was the collection of empirical data with children about their everyday lives. Such a collection of papers would be the basis for theoretical exploration of childhood.
