ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a researcher’s account of some of the methodological and ethical
issues raised in listening to children in an on-going, school-based, qualitative research
project, ‘Attending to the Child’s Voice: Children’s accounts of family and kinship’, funded
by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The project aims to establish how a sample of children
(not necessarily seen by adult agencies as having problems) define and make sense of the
concept of ‘family’, from a sociological perspective. The notion that children’s voices
should be heard on matters that affect them is a relatively new development for practitioners
(and indeed researchers), and the project attempts to assess how, methodologically,
children’s views can be elicited in an appropriate and satisfactory manner. At the time of
writing, research has been carried out in two Cambridgeshire village schools, with a sample
of ninety-nine children aged between 8 and 14 years. This chapter describes and reflects
upon the research process as an important source of data in itself (it does not attempt any
analysis of data at this stage), and also alludes to previous experiences of research with
children in an earlier project on children’s work (Morrow 1994). There are a number of
issues raised: one is that of carrying out research with an age group that is potentially
vulnerable by virtue of social status and the differential power relationship between adults
and children; another is that of researching a sensitive topic with that age group, and a third
is that of carrying out social research in schools.
