Wc Yee

Professional researcher or a ‘good guest’? Ethical dilemmas involved in researching children and families in the home setting

In this article we explore our experiences of researching children and families in the home setting. We trace the impact of the home setting on some ethical and methodological issues which arose in the course of conducting our field work and consider issues of consent, confidentiality, power, leaving the field and specifically our dilemmas, both personal and professional, around researcher identity. We suggest that our dilemmas can be encapsulated as a struggle between the conflicting requirements of the professional researcher and the ‘good guest’. Drawing upon our interviews with over 100 children and families in the Home School Knowledge Exchange (HSKE) project, we pose questions about the relationship between the researcher and the families. In reflecting on our own experiences we draw on the work of other social researchers and in addition we consider the function and efficacy of professional codes of practice to prepare and protect researchers and respondents in the field.

Linking Home and School Mathematics: The Home School Knowledge Exchange Project

In this paper, we report some initial findings from the numeracy strand of the Home School Knowledge Exchange Project, which is part of the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme. The overall aim of the project is to develop, implement and evaluate the impact of new methods of exchanging knowledge between home and school. The project has three strands, one of which focuses on enhancing numeracy at Key Stage 2. In this strand we are working with the teachers, children and parents of four primary schools, two in Bristol and two in Cardiff. The paper describes the knowledge exchange activities developed within this strand, and reports some initial findings and issues for further exploration. The nature of home mathematics, and its relationship to school mathematics, is discussed, and this is illustrated through the case study of a girl called Nadia. The paper concludes by discussing issues arising from implementing methods of knowledge exchange.