Introduction

I should really start this book with a confession-there was a time when I didn’t do numbers. To be really honest, there was a time when I was actually very critical of quantitative research. To explain, one of my main areas of research was (and still is) concerned with the effects of race and ethnicity on young children’s identities and peer cultures. When I first began reading around this area I waded through quantitative study after quantitative study that attempted in different ways to measure the levels of racial prejudice found among young children. Most of these studies used what I felt were simplistic methods, often taking the form of highly structured, experimental designs and recording children’s reactions to photographs of black and white children or their preferences for differently colored dolls (see Milner, 1983; Aboud, 1988). My main concern was that it was just not possible to put a number on children’s prejudices. Children’s racial attitudes are not fixed and quantifiable; rather they are complex, contradictory and context-specific. I argued strongly that the only way we can fully understand the impact of race in young children’s lives is through qualitative research that is able to capture the complexity of children’s attitudes and identities and place these within their specific contexts (see Connolly, 1996, 1997, 2001). At the time my own research was therefore qualitative, drawing upon in-depth ethnographic methods to study young children’s social worlds (see Connolly, 1998). Moreover, my criticisms of quantitative research in relation to race and young children soon became generalized to a criticism of all quantitative research that I too easily dismissed as simplistic and positivist.