Jo Moran-Ellis

Triangulation and integration: processes, claims and implications

Researchers who advocate the use of multiple methods often write interchangeably about ‘integrating’, ‘combining’ and ‘mixing’ methods, sometimes eliding these descriptors with ‘triangulation’, which itself encompasses several meanings. In this article we argue that such an elision is problematic since it obscures the difference between (a) the processes by which methods (or data) are brought into relationship with each other (combined, integrated, mixed) and (b) the claims made for the epistemological status of the resulting knowledge. Drawing on the literature for examples, we set out different rationales for using more than one method, then we develop a definition of integration of methods as a specific kind of relationship among methods. We also discuss different places in the research process where integration can occur: for instance, data from different sources can be integrated in the analysis stage, or findings from different sources at the point of theorizing.

Reflections on the Sociology of Childhood in the UK

The emergence and development of the sociology of childhood in the UK is strongly connected to the establishment of this area of study in the Nordic countries. However any account of this must also look at the wider context of political and cultural constructions of childhood, children and young people, and intergenerational relationships in the UK. In the early stages of childhood studies there was a synchrony between the orientation of the new social studies of childhood in the UK and changes in how children came to be politically positioned, particularly with respect to an emphasis on children’s voices, their capacity to be agentic and their status as social actors. Since then the political status of childhood has become more problematic. In the last few years there has been a notable shift towards the demonization of teenagers (adolescents) along with rising levels of anxiety concerning children generally. This represents something of a divergence between the orientations of UK policy and politics and contemporary orientations of the sociology of childhood.

It came up to here:learning from children's flood narratives

The growing body of literature that seeks to understand the social impacts of flooding has failed to recognise the value of childrens knowledge. Working with a group of flood-affected children in Hull using a storyboard methodology, this paper argues that the children have specific flood experiences that need to be understood in their own right. In this paper, we consider the ways in which the disruption caused by the flood revealed and produced new – and sometimes hidden – vulnerabilities and forms of resilience and we reflect on the ways in which paying attention to childrens perspectives enhances our understanding of resilience.

The Sleeping Lives of Children and Teenagers: Night-Worlds and Arenas of Action

Most research into sleep, even that which includes a sociological dimension, tends to focus on sleep outcomes, in effect following an agenda set by the natural sciences and psychology. The work reported in this paper engages with the material and social dimensions of sleep from within social constructionist and interactionist frameworks, seeking to explore and theorise the meaning and experience of sleep from the perspective of the sleeper. In doing this, we examine how contemporary constructions of sleep and constructions of childhood and adolescence arise and are linked in the UK context. Sleep time tends to be constructed as empty of activity other than sleeping and devoid of the sorts of interactions that characterise wakeful day-time. However, a grounded analysis of qualitative data generated with 9 children and 20 teenagers suggested that the assumption of absence of activity and interaction was misleading: their nights were populated by a range of actors, presences and activities. Placing our focus on these aspects of our participants’ accounts of their sleep we found that the temporal, spatial and interactional dimensions of routine sleep served to create a definable arena of action (Hutchby and Moran-Ellis 1998) which was marked out both materially and socially. We conceptually frame this arena of sleep as a night-world (Moran-Ellis, 2006).

Making Connections: Children, Technology, and the National Grid for Learning

Late in 1997 the UK Government launched ‘Connecting the Learning Society’ (CtLS) as the first concrete step in instituting a ‘National Grid for Learning’ which will connect schools (and other sites and institutions) to an ‘information superhighway’. This paper presents a textual analysis of CtLS which examines the ways in which technology and the child are presented. We find that CtLS relies on conventional constructions of children as learners and future adults and that, in parallel with this, its treatment of technology is schematic and articulated with and in terms of ‘the future’. The transformation of society, and the arrival of a new socio?technical future, are taken as certain. We argue, on the one hand, that a vision is propounded in which the Grid is seen as transcendent, in that it will have a major impact regardless of the social relations in the context of use; but on the other, that a careful reading of the text reveals a concern with generating alliances, enrollments and trajectories which act as a kind of infrastructure for this vision. We conclude with some thoughts on the wider set of cultural assumptions that frame the document and which help to buttress its plausibility.

Adult trust and children’s democratic participation

This chapter considers the role played by adult trust in relation to children’s democratic participation. Following an analysis of how discourses of trust in relation to children construct the participating child in different spaces of participation we find a high degree of contingency attends on how trust and distrust are mobilised by adult in relation to children when it comes to including children in decision-making processes. From a participatory perspective we find that where participatory mechanisms are realised through formalised system processes of confidence this can serve in children’s favour, but that where adults retain the warrant to override children’s views this is often articulated through questions of interpersonal trust and distrust. Finally, we argue that adults deploy or withhold interpersonal trust in relation to children as a class of person in ways which are akin to early Parsonian formulations of trust within familiar situations which suggests children as a category are held in a web of what could be characterised as ‘pre-modern’ relations to adults as a class.

Nuevos estudios de infancia, política de infancia y derechos de los niños y niñas

In a time where the future of democracy is at stake, it is necessary to recognize the significance of the contribution that the “new” childhood studies can make to securing that future, particularly with respect to establishing the importance of the agency and social competence (in different arenas of everyday life) of children as political social actors. The combination of these recognitions with the task of conceptualizing childhood politics (as politics with children) and an emancipatory development in the field of children’s rights is vital for fuller socio-theoretical and socio-political debates on solutions to the problem of positive human future for all generations. In this paper, we show how the conceptualizations and empirical work from childhood studies enhance the role that children’s rights can play in the improvement of democratic processes at a societal level, i.e. real participation. This is something that goes way beyond the tendency to treat children’s rights as an individual concern, arguing instead for a consideration of children’s rights and agency as a social requirement for democracy.

Childhood studies, children's politics and participation: perspectives for processes of democratisation

ABSTRACT From the early Frankfurt School through to the work of Manuel Castells, there has been a rich body of work on the cleavage between technological and social developments of the twentieth century in respect of the consequences for the constitution of subjectivity. However, little attention is paid to the role of children during their childhoods in attempts to bridge this gap beyond discussions about the democratic actors children will become when they are adults. This paper argues that only the full integration of children, during their childhoods, into democratic development of societies will prevent the deepening of the rift between technological and social progress. The paper traces the correspondence between the new childhood studies and those concepts of politics and politicisation which can support social progress towards an emancipatory social perspective undergirded by particular and democratisation of all areas of everyday life. Drawing on Bourdieu and ideas of participation as action, the paper critically examines the various mechanisms by which children are conventionally excluded from democratic participation and then explores how a deeper consideration of agency in childhood and social actorship opens up alternative mechanisms of inclusion and the concomitant expansion of the concept of democracy.