ABSTRACT
Since the late 1980s there has been an increasing interest in listening to children’s experiences and viewpoints, as separate to, and different from, adults. Changes reflect an acknowledgment of children’s rights to be heard as promulgated by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (see Theis and O’Kane, 2005; Hart and Tyrer, 2006; Beazley, Bessell, Ennew and Waterson, 2009). Such interest is also in line with the establishment of the paradigm for the study of childhood in the early 1990s, which emphasised the need to explore childhood, children’s relationships and cultures as areas of study in their own right (see James and Prout, 1990, 1997). The emergence of the paradigm in part reflected a move away from seeing children as passive recipients of adult socialisation, to recognition that children are social actors in their own right.
