Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood by Allison James & Alan Prout

Author:Allison James & Alan Prout
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317593812
Publisher: Routledge

Data and methods

This article is based on several studies conducted during the last ten years, all of them concerning the everyday life of Norwegian children; especially the kind of work they are engaged in, inside and outside their household. My point of departure in the first of these studies (a field study in a fishing community in the northern part of Norway), was an observation previously unknown to me, namely that children of school-age were part of the local labour force (Solberg, 1979). Since the ‘discovery’ that children worked was done in a rather special local framework, I asked myself if I had been studying a niche, a throwback from the past. Did work also belong to modern childhood? To get an answer to this question, the next study concerned the extent and distribution of different kinds of work, both work in the market and outside of it. 800 schoolchildren (aged 10–12 years) from all over the country filled in a questionnaire covering eighty specifically definable tasks, from making sandwiches for school to feeding calves (Solberg and Vestby, 1987). In the third study the definition of work was extended to include also what may be called ‘invisible’ work: for example negotiations about managing singlehandedly or sharing work (Wadel, 1973; 1984). In this study, named the Family Study, qualitative interviews were used to collect data on everyday routines in ten families living in two different parts of Oslo (Solberg and Danielsen, 1988). Mothers, fathers and children (12 years of age) were interviewed separately.

I have seen children’s work as a topic of interest in itself. Since the work of children in western modernized societies has been almost totally neglected in both social science and public debate, my studies have led to ‘discoveries’ of something unknown. My interest in children’s work has, however, also had another justification. Working in my own culture and by and large sharing the same world views as my informants, getting the necessary distance to be reflexive can be problematic. In this respect it was useful to approach the subject of childhood in an unusual way. In Norway, as in many other western industrialized cultures, the idea of combining children and work is relatively unusual. Concepts of work are more usually discussed in relation to concepts of adulthood, while concepts of childhood traditionally have belonged to the realms of play and socialization. Studying children and their work allows me, as I shall show, to break out of the traditional concept of what children are, what children can do and what ‘age’ itself means.

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