Lori G. Irwin

Interviewing Young Children: Explicating Our Practices and Dilemmas

Qualitative research studies have demonstrated that very young children can provide important insights into their daily lives and health experiences. Despite the shift to include children’s perspectives in research and document principles related to good data collection with children, there has not been a parallel move within the scholarly community to lay bare the practical challenges inherent in conducting interviews with children. In this article, the authors consider the degree to which well-known standards for qualitative research apply to research interviews with young children. They make practical recommendations that build on existing theoretical work about the conduct of qualitative interviews with young children.

Bucking the inequality gradient through early child development

A good start in life is the key to reducing health and social inequalities in society. Clyde Hertzman and colleagues argue that governments in rich and poor countries should be investing more in programmes to support early child development

Strength in adversity : motherhood for women who have been battered

Research into violence against women in intimate relationships has begun to uncover womens experiences of abuse. However, there is a paucity of research addressing womens mothering experiences in the context of partner abuse. The purpose of this study was to explore the experience of motherhood from the perspective of women who have been battered. The methodology used was interpretive description, a qualitative research approach in which the womens accounts could be conceptualized as constructed narratives. Five mothers who had been battered were interviewed twice. Analysis revealed that the abuse shaped their experiences of motherhood and that they faced complex mothering challenges, but that motherhood nevertheless acted as a buffer against the abuse and as a source of strength. The findings extend our understanding of the complexities of mothering in the context of abuse and provide direction for improving health-care support for mothers who have been abused.

Mothers who smoke: confessions and justifications.

Interviews with mothers who smoke were analyzed to examine the influence of social discourses. Women presented themselves as knowledgeable about the health risks of tobacco, confessed guilt and shame, attempted to deflect accusations of neglect for smoking or exposing their children to tobacco, provided rationalization that they smoked for the sake of their children, and, although they were all smokers, demonstrated an antismoking stance. The findings indicate that mothers are in a “bind” when it comes to smoking and fulfilling societal expectations of a good mother. Health professionals must be cognizant of how discourses constrain womens choices in relation to tobacco. Support for this project was provided in part by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research doctoral training award to Ms. Irwin and career awards to Drs. Johnson and Bottorff.

Kindergarten School Readiness and Fourth-Grade Literacy and Numeracy Outcomes of Children with Special Needs: A Population-Based Study.

In British Columbia, Canada, two population‐based databases have been linked at the level of the individual child: the Early Development Instrument, a Kindergarten school readiness measure; and the Foundation Skills Assessment, a Grade Four academic assessment. Utilising these linked data, we explored the early school readiness, literacy, and numeracy outcomes of a province‐wide study population of children with special needs (N = 3677) followed longitudinally from Kindergarten to Grade Four. In particular, we explored the categories of special needs among our study population. In addition, we investigated the Kindergarten school readiness and Grade Four literacy and numeracy outcomes of children with special needs. We also explored the Grade Four literacy and numeracy outcomes of children with special needs who were ‘not school ready’ at Kindergarten. Finally, we identified the categories of special needs of children who participated in the Kindergarten data collection, but were missing literacy and numeracy scores at Grade Four. Future directions are discussed.

Toward a Social Care Program of Research: A Population-Level Study of Neighborhood Effects on Child Development.

The article reports results from a Human Early Learning Partnership initiative that aims to address limitations within the literature concerning neighborhood effects on child development. Problems include the tendency for studies to (a) rely on small samples of children, (b) focus on high-risk populations, (c) define neighborhood by Census boundaries, (d) attend only to 1 or 2 developmental domains, and (e) adhere to a narrow understanding of socioeconomic status. By collecting data from a near-census of kindergarten children in British Columbia, Canada, using the Early Development Instrument, our research addresses all 5 problems. Findings reported in this article lay the groundwork for the Human Early Learning Partnerships much more ambitious program of social care research that aims to measure directly the processes by which physical and social settings influence human development in the formative early years, rather than to infer them from data routinely collected for other purposes. The article concludes by inviting international colleagues to critically evaluate our program of research in its early days of implementation.

The use of population‐level data to advance interdisciplinary methodology: a cell‐through‐society sampling framework for child development research

The authors argue that population‐level data should be used to advance interdisciplinary research about community effects on early development. These data permit the identification of neighborhoods in which development patterns deviate from predictions based on local socioeconomic status (SES). So‐called ‘off‐diagonal’ places signal where researchers are likely to discover processes that either deflect the risks of low SES or dampen the salutary impact of favorable SES. Since such neighborhoods will be best understood relative to nearby ‘on‐diagonal’ neighborhoods where macro‐economic and/or public policy factors are constant, the authors present a methodology for illuminating these regional clusters. The method is deployed in British Columbia, Canada, where a team has collected developmental observations from two censuses of kindergarten children (n = 82,632). The article discusses how these clusters can be used to coordinate sampling decisions among academics representing the range of disciplines needed to study child development from cell‐through‐society, as is recommended in the literature.