ABSTRACT
Introduction The sentiment that children should be seen and not heard could not be more inappropriate for the current era in which there is a growing demand for research that involves interviewing children. The construction of childhood that views children as incomplete adults is coming under attack and there is a new demand for research that focuses on children as actors in their own right. The French historian Philip Aries (1962) suggested that modern western childhood is unique in the way that it quarantines children from the world of adults, so that childhood is associated with play and education rather than work and economic responsibility. The quarantine of childhood is represented in the exclusion of children from statistics and other social accounts (Qvortrup 1990) and there exists very little material that directly addresses the experience of childhood, at the societal level. (For a useful overview of quantitative data available on children in Britain, see Church and Summerfield 1997.) In surveys of the general population, children have been usually regarded as out of scope and samples are usually drawn from the adult population, with a minimum age of 16 or 18. Interviews with children have long been central to the research of developmental psychologists, child psychiatrists and educational specialists, but until quite recently general purpose surveys have not included children as respondents (see Roberts, Chapter 11).
