ABSTRACT
This short contribution does not seek to present new insights on methods, but rather attempts to investigate more thoroughly the methodological question: is doing research with children different from doing research with adults? Samantha Punch opens space for my argument by asking: ‘[i]f children are competent social actors, why are special ‘child-friendly’ methods needed to communicate with them? (Punch, 2002, p. 321) and by highlighting that a significant amount of discussion focuses on ethics with children and less so on methodologies. While these are important questions, I am concerned that Punch’s paper reiterates a more general tendency to employ a meta-narative of ‘children’ that is based on the polarised, fixed and separated identities of child and adult. I question the usefulness of such categories on the basis that individuals’ identities have increasingly been recognised as constructed through a diverse web of overlapping subjectivities, and that identity is something we ‘do’ not ‘have’. Given this, why do we still so often use fixed definitions of identity when it comes to our work with children?
